Why do we only get a 2 day weekend?

So it’s Friday! The beginning of the weekend for a lot of people, but how did we as a society come to a 5 day work week? The Unbalanced Breakfast has the answer!

For the majority of history, it was very common to only get one day off a week for worship. But it wasn’t until the industrial revolution in the late 1800s when the two day weekend took shape. Getting Sunday’s off was fairly common as it’s the Christian day of worship, and with the large number of Jewish immigrants, they wanted their traditional day of rest, Saturday, off too. Henry Ford saw an opportunity. He realized that he could sell more cars to his employees if they had time off to enjoy driving them, so he implemented the two day weekend in the early 1900s, with the US government limiting companies to a 40 hour work week many years later in 1938. So that weekend you know and love so much, is a) only around 100 years old, and b) was designed so you would buy more stuff.

You can hear more stuff like this during Ginger Snaps, weekdays at 6:40a and 8:40a! What are you doing this weekend? Let us know on The Unbalanced Breakfast Facebook page! Give us a like, and follow us on Twitter: @KennyJones77 and @BigGingerFM. Snap us on Snapchat: Kenny.Jones & BigGingerFM! And you can always hit us up on the CONTACT US page too!