The weekend, 100 years old this year, is fraying. Not collapsing, not dying, but fraying at precisely the edges that were always its greatest strength: the shared ones.
In 1926, Henry Ford formalised the five-day week for his factory workers on 1 May, extending it to office staff that August. The decision had roots going back to 1922, when Ford’s son Edsel, then company president, had explained the thinking plainly: ‘Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation.’ Ford senior was rather more hard-nosed about it in print, noting that ‘people who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles.’ He was selling cars. He needed people to have weekends in which to want them.
The minimum daily wage at Ford’s factories at the time was $6 per day, raised from the $5 introduced in 1914, according to Teaching American History. New employees would start at $5. Ford was not being purely philanthropic, but the effect was real: a two-day weekend became an industrial standard, and eventually a cultural cornerstone.
The Weekend 100 Years Old, and Already Leaking Into Friday
A century on, the weekend’s borders have gone porous. Friday is the main culprit. For a growing class of hybrid workers, the last day of the working week has quietly seceded from it: calendar open, brain largely on standby. Call it Skiveday Friday, or simply acknowledge what Transport for London discovered the hard way.
In a three-month trial from 8 March to 31 May 2024, TfL scrapped peak fares on Fridays to tempt commuters back into central London. According to TfL’s own trial report, an average of 1.31 million peak-time rail journeys were made on Fridays during the trial period: the same level as pre-trial Fridays. The discount moved nothing. Friday had already gone, and no price incentive was bringing it back.
LNER and Avanti have now reclassified Fridays as off-peak days, joining Saturdays and Sundays. The railways are simply reading the data.
Pedro Gomes, professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Friday is the New Saturday, puts it well. ‘The weekend isn’t just about the number of hours,’ he says. ‘It is also a coordination device for communities to connect.’ That is the point most of the four-day week debate misses. It is not only about productivity. It is about synchrony.
What the Four-Day Week Evidence Actually Shows
The 4 Day Week Foundation reports that 56 of the 61 companies in its UK pilot chose to continue the arrangement after the scheme ended, and that staff turnover fell by 57% during the trial. Those are the figures the Foundation publishes. They also cite ‘35% increased revenue,’ which the snippet repeats as a direct trial result.
It is not quite that. According to the Autonomy Institute’s pilot results report, revenue across participating companies rose by just 1.4% on a weighted average during the trial period itself. The 35% figure is a year-on-year comparison to 2021, a year still heavily distorted by the pandemic. The Foundation’s headline number is not wrong, exactly, but it flatters the policy considerably.
The longer-term picture is more persuasive on different grounds. A follow-up Autonomy Institute report published in February 2024, one year on from the pilot, found that 100% of managers and chief executives consulted said the four-day week had a positive or very positive impact on their organisation. Some 82% reported positive effects on staff wellbeing; 50% saw meaningful reductions in staff turnover; 32% said it had improved recruitment. Those are not revolutionary numbers, but they are consistent ones.
James Cleverly announced this year that a future Conservative government would ban four-day weeks for council staff. Steve Reed attacked the Liberal Democrat-led South Cambridgeshire council for ‘paying full-time wages for part-time work.’ The political resistance is real, and not entirely without logic: 260 companies in the UK have signed up to the four-day week, but the vast majority of the workforce has not, and probably cannot.
Brad Beaven, professor of social and cultural history at the University of Portsmouth, frames the underlying tension neatly. ‘The weekend looms large because it represents the triumph of collective time over market time,’ he says. ‘It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.’ The problem is that autonomy is now distributed very unevenly. Knowledge workers choose when to work; care workers, delivery drivers and hospital staff do not. The weekend means something different depending on which side of that line you stand.
The Soviets ran an experiment from 1929 to 1940 in which citizens were given a rotating day off, staggered across the population. Factories stayed open; productivity was supposed to soar. It did not. A worker wrote to Pravda to ask: ‘What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us?’ The scheme was abandoned. The lesson was simple: a day off is not much use unless other people are off too.
At 100, the weekend has survived every threat thrown at it, from television to TikTok. The question is whether it can survive the one thing Ford never anticipated: a workforce divided not by factory walls, but by the nature of the work itself. The real test comes if the three-day weekend ever arrives for some but not others. That is when ‘Skiveday Friday’ stops being a harmless joke and starts being a fault line.
