IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 5

The idea that a week contains two days on which most people do not work is barely a century old, and it was not the gift of any single reformer. Before industrial employment, the rhythm of work followed daylight, harvest and weather rather than a calendar. Rest was frequent but irregular, and the notion of a fixed, recurring, guaranteed block of time away from work would have been unintelligible to most agricultural labourers.

The first ingredient was an informal custom rather than a law. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, many artisans simply did not turn up on Monday, having spent Sunday drinking, and the practice was widespread enough to acquire an ironic name: Saint Monday. Employers disliked it and could not easily stop it, because skilled workers were scarce and the work was paid by the piece. Several manufacturers eventually offered a half-day on Saturday in exchange for a full and sober Monday, which is the trade that created the modern shape of the week.

Religion supplied the second ingredient, and it did so by accident. Factories with a substantial Jewish workforce faced a genuine scheduling problem, since the Jewish sabbath falls on Saturday and the Christian one on Sunday. Some American employers found it simpler to close for both days than to operate a divided workforce, and a two-day closure that began as an accommodation became a norm that outlasted its original reason.

The economic argument arrived last and mattered most. Henry Ford adopted a five-day week at his plants in 1926, and although he is often credited with generosity his stated reasoning was commercial: workers with leisure and wages would buy the goods that mass production made cheaply, and workers without time could not consume. Productivity data from earlier experiments supported the change, since output per hour rose enough to offset a substantial part of the lost hours.

Legal protection followed practice by more than a decade in most countries, and the sequence matters for how the change is usually described. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set the forty-hour threshold in the United States by making longer hours expensive rather than illegal, and comparable measures elsewhere generally codified an arrangement that large employers had already adopted. Legislation did not invent the weekend; it made it difficult to withdraw.

What the history suggests about current proposals is less encouraging than advocates usually allow. The two-day weekend emerged from a shortage of skilled labour, a religious coincidence and a specific theory of mass consumption, and none of those conditions holds in the same way now. Trials of a four-day week report gains that resemble the early Ford results, but the earlier shift took roughly eighty years from Saint Monday to federal law, and the parts of the workforce it reached last were the parts with the least bargaining power.