Fast Company excerpts How to Get Away
Fast Company just published an excerpt of How to Get Away, Jon and I's book on the philosophy behind Getaway. Here's how it begins:
Before the Civil War, the Sabbath was the only time that most free, working Americans had off. In the late 1860s, while there were a few unenforced eight-hour-day laws on the books, most Americans worked 10 to 12 hours a day. In fact, the word weekend did not even exist until the 1870s. The first documented use of the word was in 1879, when a British magazine explained, “If a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at so-and-so.”
However, before the weekend, many workers were already taking an informal second day off. They called it “keeping Saint Monday”—skipping work to recover from drinking all day Sunday. The practice was so common that Benjamin Franklin once bragged that he’d gotten promoted simply by consistently showing up for work on Monday: “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master.” There’s even a 1793 folk song about it, “The Jovial Cutler,” which begins:
Brother workmen cease your labour,
Lay your files and hammers by.
Listen while a brother neighbour
Sings a cutler’s destiny:
How upon a good Saint Monday,
Sitting by the smithy fire,
Telling what’s been done o’ t’ Sunday,
And in cheerful mirth conspire.
In some factories, a protoweekend was created when factory owners traded a half-day off on Saturday in exchange for ending St. Mondays.
With the Industrial Revolution, fewer people farmed, a form of labor that had a natural stopping point at sundown. As laborers moved into factories, working conditions became harsher, and the workday became more regimented. With the growth of industrialism came the growth of the labor movement, which pressed for worker interests.
Read the whole excerpt — 'People fought for time off from work, so stop working so much' — here.