Here’s why some people say the 2-day weekend is due for a makeover

As the two-day weekend turns 100 years old, some say it’s high time for a calendar shakeup. 

“Almost nobody alive remembers the time before we had a five-day week and a two-day weekend,” said Grace Tallon, co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based consultancy group that helps employers adopt shorter work hours.

Labour historians and advocates for workweek reform point out that much has changed since the two-day weekend became standard about a century ago, depending on where you are in the world.

Tallon notes that only 20 per cent of women were in the workforce at that time. “Now we have mostly dual-income households, yet we still have a situation where we have a five-day workweek that doesn’t serve really any family.”

Experts also point out that the weekend is a human-made concept that has evolved before and can evolve again.

Grace Tallon, co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a Toronto-based consultancy group that helps employers adopt shorter work hours, says the way we live and work has changed a lot since we last revisited the length of the workweek. (Submitted by Grace Tallon)

How the two-day weekend came about

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a long workweek was the norm.

“Basically, if you were working for wages, the regular work week was six days of 10 hours a day,” said labour historian Craig Heron, a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto. 

“The beginning of the weekend was the Sunday that everyone got off for religious reasons,” Heron told Cost of Living host Paul Haavardsrud.

Though Henry Ford is widely credited with instituting a two-day weekend, there’s quite a bit more to the story, including decades of work by the labour movement.

Prior to Ford’s five-day-week, small groups of workers had achieved similar reforms.

“The most famous group were the printers,” Heron said. “They managed to get an eight-hour day by about 1910.”

An illustration published in the Canadian Illustrated News shows workers taking part in a Nine-Hour Movement march in Hamilton, Ont., in 1872. The movement pushed for shorter working days and helped spur major changes to Canadian labour law. (Canadian Illustrated News/Library and Archives Canada)

When Ford announced in October 1926 that his factories would move to a five-day week, the company became the first major U.S. employer to do so. 

That same month, the American Federation of Labor passed a resolution at its annual congress calling for a five-day week, Heron says.

But it would be a while until the two-day weekend was broadly adopted, including in Canada, he says.

Many workplaces in North America and elsewhere first reduced Saturday work to half a day.

The labour movement grew stronger in the 1940s as the Second World War drove demand for workers, giving unions greater leverage to win shorter workdays through major strikes, he says. 

Governments began to take note and legislate accordingly.

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