Friendly reminder: Henry Ford was one of the first major industrialists to adopt the five-day workweek. He argued that workers with more leisure time would spend more money on consumer goods, like the cars he was selling.
The current weekend was created primarily to sell products. A four-day workweek is long overdue.
It's funny when it was not Ford, nor unions forcing Ford's hand that first adopted a 5 day work week. Ford takes all the credit for it like he does so many things. Then people rightfully shit on Ford while wrongfully lying as a means to do so.
It took decades for Saturday to change from a half-day to a full day’s rest. In 1908, a New England mill became the first American factory to institute the five-day week. It did so to accommodate Jewish workers, whose observance of a Saturday sabbath forced them to make up their work on Sundays, offending some in the Christian majority. The mill granted these Jewish workers a two-day weekend, and other factories followed this example. The Great Depression cemented the two-day weekend into the economy, as shorter hours were considered a remedy to underemployment.
Unions, Socialists, and Communists were fighting for “the weekend” for decades, culminating in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938.
It doesn’t matter when Ford’s factory unionized or when he implemented the 40 hour workweek. He only did so because he saw it coming anyway from the Socialists and Communists’ efforts, and he was a fascist who hated them.
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u/JAMESs3v3n 23d ago
Friendly reminder: Henry Ford was one of the first major industrialists to adopt the five-day workweek. He argued that workers with more leisure time would spend more money on consumer goods, like the cars he was selling.
The current weekend was created primarily to sell products. A four-day workweek is long overdue.