The Weekend Was a Product Launch

We invented Saturdays off so people would have time to buy cars. Now, maybe it’s time for another upgrade.

Before the weekend was sacred, it was strategy.

A century ago, most Americans worked six days a week. Then, in 1926, Henry Ford gave his factory workers Saturday off with full pay. He wasn’t being generous; he believed that rested workers would be more productive, and that with an extra day of leisure, they might actually use their cars. The strategy worked. By 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made the 40-hour work week the U.S. national standard, and the weekend became a cornerstone of modern consumer life.

What started as an economic calculation became something more like a social contract. By the 1950s, the weekend had evolved into the reward at the end of labor—a space for backyard barbecues, Little League games, and the kind of family time that justified the rest of the week. Sunday morning meant church; Saturday night meant freedom. To work through the weekend became a sign of either burning ambition or quiet desperation. The weekend wasn’t just time off; it was proof you’d made it. Suggesting we rethink it would have seemed as radical as questioning the 40-hour work week itself once did.

Today, a hundred years later, the logic behind that system is starting to collapse. COVID broke the link between productivity and presence. Remote work killed the daily commute. AI is shrinking the need for human hours. Yet despite all our computers, AI, apps, wifi, and coffee shops, we in the U.S. largely still cling to a rhythm designed for assembly lines and punch clocks. But internationally, work week experiments have already been rewriting that rhythm.

In Iceland, between 2015 and 2019, 2,500 workers cut their workweeks from 40 to about 36 hours with no pay loss. Productivity held steady or improved, and burnout dropped sharply. By 2022, nearly 60 percent of Iceland’s workforce had moved to shorter or more flexible hours. The U.K. ran a similar trial in 2022 with 61 companies and 2,900 employees: After six months, 92 percent of firms kept the new schedule, reporting a 71 percent drop in burnout, 65 percent less sick leave, and 57 percent fewer resignations. In Japan, Microsoft tested a four-day work week in 2019 and found productivity per worker jumped 40 percent, while electricity use fell by 23%.

The data are consistent: shorter weeks do not hurt output, but they do heal people. And generally speaking, the formats are flexible. Some firms do four ten-hour days, others go to 32-hour weeks with no pay cuts, and others rotate off-days to keep coverage steady. The point is not working fewer hours, but smarter ones.

Once you question the workweek, other inherited systems start to look suspicious, too. Why do K-12 schools still run on agrarian calendars? Why is health insurance tied to full-time employment? Why does traffic surge at 5 p.m. in a world of remote work?

The five-day work week was one of the 20th century’s great design achievements, a pact between capital, labor, and consumption that built the modern world. But like the Model T that inspired it, it belongs to another era. If the weekend was invented to make people move, maybe the next revolution is to let them stop.