How the four-day week evolved

Debates over the length of the workweek are nothing new. In 1926, the Ford Motor Company standardised the Monday-to-Friday pattern; beforehand, the common practice was a six-day workweek, with only Sundays off.

Henry Ford’s theory was that [working] five days, with the same pay, would increase worker productivity, in that people would put more effort into the shorter workweek,” says Jim Harter, chief scientist for workplace management and wellbeing at US analytics firm Gallup, based in Nebraska.. The theory was largely proven correct: in the decades since, the five-day workweek is been commin