Selected parts of a pleasurable and informative article in “The Guardian” below.
The weekend is 100 years old
In 1926, Henry Ford gave his employees both Saturdays and Sundays off – and the two-day chunk of time to party, pray or simply do nothing was born. Now it’s changed beyond recognitionA 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.”
Before industrialisation, there was little concept of consecutive days of leisure, because animals and crops could not be so long neglected. Work was dictated by the weather and the seasons, the clock mattering less than the sun. Factories, with their whistles and watches, changed the way time worked. A mechanised drumbeat of shifts and paydays drowned out the old rhythms of seasons and saints’ days.
…As work became more rigidly organised, the possibility emerged that leisure could be, too. Time off wasn’t merely a concession to workers, but also an engine of consumer capitalism. People with weekends would go to sports stadiums, buy picnic baskets and new clothes, need cinema tickets. By the late 20th century, with the arrival of cheap flights, this had evolved into the minibreak: a miniature holiday, designed to fit into a weekend. Leisure time, once the opposite of the economy, became part of it.
…Morals – and the absence of them – have always been a theme of the weekend. When Sunday, a time of worship, was the only day off, skilled workers developed a habit of extending their free time into “Saint Monday”, by not turning up for work after a particularly enthusiastic day of drinking. Saturday afternoons off – and then the whole day – were granted by employers partly in the hope of bringing the hangovers forward by a day.
..The reality has never been quite so clean-cut. Weekends are naughty and nice, both bad behaviour and Sunday best.
…The weekend is time carved out of, and in tension with, someone else’s ownership of your time.
…The weekend feels like a cornerstone of civilisation, of democracy, because it matters most to those who spend the majority of the week following orders instead of giving them.
Thanks for sharing this. Other than Ford it will several decades later before general workers got weekends off in the USA. Workers rights were hard fought by the unions and no one, other than Ford, ever "gave" their workers anything until there was a demand, a strike and immense suffering. These rights are eroding in the US and worldwide as companies hire "contract" staff that have no rights - including UNICEF consultants. It is sad that hard fought workers rights are eroding - due to contract work and being digitally connected all the time - with some bosses (even in UNICEF) expecting their staff are online all the time ready to not only jump but to ask "how high". We are lucky to be retired and not be effected directly by this - but it is all too real for our children and grandchildren to have lets rights than we did.
ReplyDeleteHabib identifies a growing danger. A small number of US companies now control technologies on which governments and societies depend. At the same time, these companies depend on the US government for contracts, favorable regulation, and access to foreign markets. This creates a powerful alliance between US authority and private wealth.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I would not conclude that there is already a coordinated plan by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Musk, and others to take control of the world’s assets. These companies have different and conflicting interests. Nor can it be demonstrated that American "regime change" is being conducted on their behalf. Looking back over the past decades, attempts at regime change have not really been that successful.
That said, Governments are becoming dependent on private companies for national security. In turn, those companies are becoming dependent on government power to expand their global interests. That is a problem. The solution must be to ensure that their power is subject to the rule of democratic law.
The United Nations and other international institutions should be defended, but they will not regain authority just by invoking the rules-based international order. They must demonstrate that they are effective, accountable and capable.
We may not yet be living under a new world order governed by “United Companies”. But power is moving away from institutions that are at least theoretically accountable to citizens and towards a small circle of powerful corporations.
That is dangerous enough without claiming more than the evidence can support. The time to establish democratic control is before the dependence becomes irreversible.
How that should be done is the question that needs attention.