The present-day concept of the relatively longer 'week-end' first arose in the industrial north of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century
[1] and was originally a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers allowing Saturday afternoon off from 2pm in agreement that staff would be available for work sober and refreshed on Monday morning.
[7] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term weekend to the British magazine
Notes and Queries in 1879.
[8]
In 1908, the first five-day workweek in
the United States was instituted by a
New Englandcotton mill so that
Jewish workers would not have to work on the Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
[9] In 1926,
Henry Ford began shutting down his
automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday. In 1929, the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America Union was the first union to demand and receive a five-day workweek. The rest of the
United States slowly followed, but it was not until 1940, when a provision of the 1938
Fair Labor Standards Act mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek went into effect, that the two-day weekend was adopted nationwide.
[9]
