GoKawiilFor 11 years, from 1929 to 1940, the Soviet Union did not have weekends. Instead, to increase productivity citizens were allocated a day off in every seven at random. With 80% of the population at work on any given day, factories never had to power down.
A letter from a disgruntled worker to Pravda newspaper, published soon after the implementation of this new working calendar, outlined the problems: “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 letter-writer asked. “It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” Parents found themselves at home while their children were at school, or with kids unsupervised while they were on shift. With no shared day off, extended family gatherings became impossible. The workforce became demoralised and listless, the projected spike in productivity never materialised, and the policy was first modified, then abandoned altogether.
Eleven years, though. Is that not absolutely wild? A world without weekends feels impossible. A world without Saturday Night Fever, without Manic Monday. We may no longer go to church on Sunday, but we still worship the weekend. “The weekend looms large because it represents the triumph of collective time over market time,” says Brad Beaven, professor of social and cultural history at the University of Portsmouth. “It is not just about rest, but about reclaiming autonomy from the industrial clock.”
View image in fullscreen ‘We romanticise the weekend, even the prosaic bits – like the distant roar of a lawnmower.’ Photograph: Cavan Images/Liz DeGroff/Getty Images/Cavan Images RF
Saturday and Sunday, sacred to the dignity and humanity of working people, are laden with mythology and ceremony. From Cilla Black to Gary Lineker, the main characters of our weekends become giants of the culture. We romanticise the weekend, even the prosaic bits – the distant roar of a lawnmower, the rattle of classified football results on the radio. Everyone knows what a weekend means. The snap of a laptop cover at 4.58pm on a Friday. The clink of the first pint glass and the smell of chips on the way home. The slow-motion pace of a weekend pavement, the gear change from hustle to meander. The rituals have changed with the times, of course, and people-watching at brunch on Saturday is now as much of a tradition as cooking a roast at home on Sunday. A weekend changes shape as you move through life stages, but in each iteration it remains a shared experience between you and your peers.
“The weekend that I had when I was 20 was very different from the weekend that I have now, at 40 and with kids,” laughs Pedro Gomes, professor of economics at Birkbeck, University of London and author of the book Friday is the New Saturday. “When you are young, you are bonding with your friends, and then when you get older, you might be with your family. Eventually, you might be with grandchildren. We move through different manifestations of the weekend, in our lifetimes.”
But it can be hard to pin down, these days, where a weekend begins and ends. Laundry gets done on a work-from-home Friday, but emails are answered on Sunday. A shopping splurge is as likely to be a cheer-up treat on your phone after a tough Wednesday as a Saturday outing. The traditional Saturday 3pm football kick-off has been stretched across the television schedules all the way to Monday evening. The four-day week – first predicted by Richard Nixon, of all people, in 1956 – has become a reality in the Netherlands, with people working an average of 32.1 hours. Friday is forging ahead with a quiet secession from the working week without anyone signing off the paperwork. It raises the question: what even is “the weekend” in 2026?
Remarkably, the concept of the weekend as we know it is only 100 years old. In 1926, Henry Ford changed the shape of the week, announcing that the workers at his factories would now do five eight-hour days instead of six, with no cut in pay. Ford did not invent the weekend – the idea had been bubbling under for a century, in campaigns by trade unions, religious groups and progressive employers – but by putting his considerable industrial weight behind it, the two-day chunk of freedom was born.
“It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote in his company’s Ford News in October 1926. Ford’s innovation was in part a response to his earlier invention: the assembly line, which had increased productivity but exhausted workers, with absenteeism up to 10% in factories; in his article he did not disguise that there was self-interest involved. “People who have more leisure require more transportation in vehicles,” he continued. The new fashion for day trips was an effective marketing device to sell cars. Meanwhile, his factories maintained a steady level of productivity despite the reduced hours. In 1938, faced with rising unemployment levels in the Great Depression, the five-day week was officially adopted across the US.
View image in fullscreen The weekend used to start after work at around 5pm on a Friday … Photograph: fotoVoyager/Getty Images
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