Ford Makes It Official: Five Days, Forty Hours

In the fall of 1926 the Ford Motor Company told its workers that a week's work would be five eight-hour days. The weekend as we know it was taking shape.

In September 1926 the Ford Motor Company announced a five-day, 40-hour week for its plants. A month later, on October 15, 1926, the company newspaper Ford News spelled it out in one sentence: "Five working days of eight hours, with no overtimes, is to constitute a week's work for U.S. company employees."

It was not quite as sudden as it sounded. A Christian Science Monitor report of September 27, 1926 said the five-day schedule had been "pretty much in effect since July" in some departments. Four years earlier, in 1922, the company had already said it hoped to stop working Saturdays and Sundays, because "every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation" — while admitting the goal "cannot be fully realized at once."

Why a carmaker wanted people to work less

Ford's argument was partly about business. People with free time travel, shop and go out — and to do that, many of them needed a car. In 1926 the cheapest Ford Model T Runabout listed at $360, and a Touring car at $380. A two-day weekend gave workers both the time and the reason to buy one.

From one company to a whole country

Other employers watched and argued. It took the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to make overtime pay — one and a half times the regular rate — part of federal law for many workers, and the 40-hour standard spread from there. A schedule that started in the departments of one Detroit company became the normal shape of an American week.