Imagine like the ultimate weekend. Okay. Now
imagine that to get it entire cities of workers
just collectively decided to ghost their bosses
and go on a massive coordinated bender every
single Monday which is just a wild concept today
right I mean we look at our calendars today and
we think of the two -day weekend as like a law
of nature the Sun rises the Sun sets and Monday
through Friday you work yeah it feels completely
permanent exactly it feels so ingrained in the
human experience that you think it was etched
into stone tablets at the dawn of civilization
mm -hmm but when you actually look into the history
of how we spend our time. That neat, rigid schedule
completely falls apart. The shape of our week
isn't a law of physics at all. Not even close.
It's a messy, chaotic invention. And the historical
records we're looking at today, drawing from
a truly fascinating piece of labor history, show
exactly how messy that invention really was.
They really do. So welcome to another Deep Dive.
Today, our mission is to explore how a centuries
-old tradition of workplace rebellion shaped
the exact way you and I think about the modern
work week. That's a great topic. OK, let's unpack
this, because we have to go back to a time before
the weekend even existed. Right. And to really
grasp the magnitude of what these workers pulled
off, I need you to imagine the standard working
life going back centuries. Way back. Yeah, long
before the steam engines and assembly lines of
the Industrial Revolution. Picture the 17th century.
Okay, setting the scene. The absolute expectation
for craft workers, so we're talking shoemakers,
weavers, cutlers, was this grueling nonstop Monday
through Saturday schedule. Which just sounds
exhausting. Oh, it was. You worked six days a
week from sunrise to sunset. There was no two
-day weekend to recharge. No TGIF. No, definitely
not. There was no concept of a work -life balance
at all. It was just relentless, backbreaking
labor. Right. So the question becomes, how does
a human being or an entire workforce cope with
that kind of crushing structural exhaustion?
And the answer is they invent a saint. Exactly.
They invent a saint. And they don't name it after
a martyr or some holy figure. They name it after
a day of the link. Saint Monday. Yes. They called
it Saint Monday. And let's define exactly what
this phenomenon was because it is wild. It really
is. St. Monday was a massive widespread tradition
of worker absenteeism on Mondays. It was incredibly
common among these craft workers, going back
to at least the 17th century. Just a complete
shutdown. Yeah, huge swaths of the workforce
just decided they simply weren't going in on
Monday. It's like taking a mental health day
to cure the Sunday scaries, but done en masse.
Right. and there was even an escalated slightly
rarer version of this called Saint Tuesday where
this phantom holiday just kept rolling into the
next morning. It was essentially the ultimate
unauthorized extension of the weekend pulled
off by people who didn't actually have a weekend
to begin with. Which immediately makes me wonder
about the basic mechanics of 17th century capitalism,
you know. Yeah, how does it survive? Exactly.
If I run a business today and my entire staff
ghosts me every single Monday to go drink, I
am firing everyone and the business probably
goes under. So if everyone was doing this, how
did the whole system collapse? if the workforce
just vanished for a day or two every week? Well,
what's fascinating here is that the system didn't
collapse because business owners, the master
craftsmen, essentially had no choice but to adapt.
Really, they just took it. They had to. It became
an ingrained cultural expectation that masters
simply had to put up with. The sheer scale of
the absenteeism gave the workers incredible leverage.
Because everyone was doing it. Exactly. This
wasn't just a few isolated people sleeping in.
But to understand why the master's put up with
it, we have to look at the mechanics of how work
was actually done back then. OK. In the era before
factories, a lot of craft work was done on a
piece rate basis. Oh, right. So the master wasn't
necessarily paying for the worker's time by the
hour he was paying for the finished product.
Ah, I see. So if you're making shoes, the boss
doesn't care if you're sitting at your bench
on Monday morning as long as he gets the 10 pairs
of shoes by Saturday night. Precisely. The workers
had a really high degree of autonomy over their
own pacing. If a shoemaker took Monday and maybe
even Tuesday off to drink and socialize, he would
just make up for it by working incredibly long
hours later in the week. Just cramming it all
in at the end. Yeah, often by candlelight on
Thursday and Friday. And the master still got
his goods to sell. Interesting. Now the Masters
hated the unpredictability, of course, but because
they didn't have a massive factory with, you
know, heavy overhead costs burning a hole in
their pockets every hour, it sat empty. They
could afford to be a little more flexible. Exactly.
They could absorb that erratic schedule. They
were prepared to put up with it because the economic
structure allowed for that flexibility. That
flexibility completely changes the power dynamic,
though. I mean, the bosses didn't officially
grant this day off. The workers just seized it.
Right. And the piece rate system gave them the
cover to do it. But let's look at the physical
reality of pulling something like this off. OK.
If you're a working class crafts person in the
1700s. How do you actually execute a weekly coordinated
hooky day without starving? It's a good question.
Because if you aren't working those first two
days, your cash flow is severely disrupted, right?
Well, that brings us to the logistics of leisure.
St. Monday wasn't just a random act of rebellion.
It was the result of a perfect storm of economic
and social factors aligning. A perfect storm
how? First, consider the economy of Monday. Payday
during this era was almost universally on Saturday
night. OK, so the end of the six -day grind.
Exactly. You grind through your week, and finally,
Saturday evening, you get your wages. In a society
without modern banking, that meant you were physically
holding your entire week's survival in your pocket.
Right in your hand. Right. By Sunday, you've
rested a bit, maybe attended church. Come Monday
morning, you still have a spare cash burning
a hole in your pocket. So you actually have the
funds. You have the temporary financial independence
to buy yourself a day of freedom. Wow. It's that
incredibly dangerous window right after the paycheck
clears, before the reality of next week's rent
sets in. Yeah, we've all been there. And then
you add in the food factor. Food factor. Yeah.
Historical records show that workers usually
had a large meal on Sunday. a roast, perhaps,
and they would have significant leftovers on
Monday. Well, that makes sense. This sounds like
a minor detail, but it's crucial. In many trades,
daily meals were provided by the employer or
they were tied to the workplace infrastructure.
So you had to go to work just to eat. Normally,
yes. But having your own food at home meant you
were physically independent from the master's
canteen. Yeah. You didn't have to show up just
to get a hot meal. Pocket money and cold cuts.
Mm -hmm. They basically built their own little
survival bubble that lasted exactly one extra
day. Exactly. And the final mechanism that kept
this alive was the social draw. The taverns.
Right. Because this absenteeism was a collective
action, if you decided to take St. Monday off,
you knew for a fact you wouldn't be sitting at
home alone. Well, your friends are off too. There
was guaranteed company waiting for you at the
local tavern. It became this self -sustaining
social ecosystem. Pure pressure, basically. Yeah,
you didn't go to work because your friends weren't
at work, and your friends weren't at work because
they knew you'd be at the pub. OK, but let me
push back and challenge the romantic framing
of this for a second. Go for it. We're calling
it leisure and framing it as this grand noble
tradition of the working class resting up and
reclaiming their time. Right. But if they had
a pocket full of fresh wages and they were all
gathering at the tavern, were they engaging in
mindful recuperation, or was this basically a
massive city -wide bender? That's the real question.
Because a coordinated tavern takeover sounds
less like a labor movement and more like a weekly
riot. Well, that tension is exactly what we see
when we look closely at the primary texts from
the era. OK, so the sources show this. Yes. These
practical logistics, the timing of the Saturday
payout, the Sunday leftovers, the tavern culture,
they organically built a ramp straight into the
pub. It is a brilliant example of how structural
systems dictate human behavior. But to answer
your question about what they were actually doing,
we have to look at the cultural artifacts they
left behind. The firsthand accounts. Right. And
they paint a very vivid, often conflicting picture
of what St. Monday actually looked like on the
ground. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Because the historical texts provide us with
two drastically different perspectives on the
reality of this day. They do. And the first one
comes from a name everyone listening will recognize,
Benjamin Franklin. Yes. Long before he was a
founding father, Franklin worked as a young man
in a printing house in London. Right. And in
his autobiography, he reflects on this period
and explicitly uses the tradition of St. Monday
to draw a sharp contrast between himself and
his English peers. Oh, he definitely does. He
writes very proudly, I find this detail absolutely
hilarious. This very him. It is. Benjamin Franklin
essentially reveals himself to be the ultimate
corporate brown -noser. He's looking around the
printing press, seeing all his fellow craftsmen
nursing massive hangovers or just completely
blowing off work. And instead of joining the
Brotherhood, he thinks... Perfect. Less competition
for me. He seized the opportunity. He weaponized
his own sobriety to get ahead. He didn't view
St. Monday's a hard -won right of the working
man. He viewed it as a gross inefficiency that
he could exploit for his own career advancement.
It is the absolute embodiment of the Protestant
work ethic. Franklin is actively framing himself
as the ambitious exception to a culture of widespread
idleness. But while Franklin gives us the perspective
of the sober, upwardly mobile worker trying to
impress management, we also have texts that provide
a window into the actual celebrations of the
day. From the people actually at the pub. Exactly,
from the perspective of the revelers. And it
fundamentally challenges that romanticized labor
movement. narrative you mentioned earlier. It
really does. Take the 18th century folk song
from Sheffield, England called the Jovial Cutler.
A Cutler being a highly skilled craftsman who
makes knives and hand tools. The song starts
off sounding like this glorious idyllic ode to
the brotherhood of the working man. Very poetic.
Yeah. The Cutler sings, brother workmen cease
your labor. Lay your files and hammers by. Sounds
great so far. Right. He describes sitting by
the warmth of the smitty fire on a beautiful
St. Monday, balancing a pitcher of ale on his
knee, cheerfully conspiring and telling tales
of Sunday with his friends. It sounds incredibly
cozy. It sounds like the working class joyfully
sticking it to the man. It sounds like a triumph
of the human spirit until the trap door opens.
Oh, man. That is the pivotal moment. The color
is sitting there with his picture, enjoying his
hard -won freedom, and suddenly he hears the
trapdoor rise up from the floor below. His wife
is standing on the ladder, and she is absolutely
not participating in this cheerful mirth. Her
opening line to him is brutal. She says, damn
thee Jack, I'll dust thy eyes up, thou leads
a plaguey drunken life. It strips away the entire
romantic veneer in a single sentence. Just immediately.
Yeah. And she goes on to list the specific devastating
costs of his so -called leisure. The real world
consequences. Exactly. She calls him a bright
fat idle devil who sits around. reveling while
she slaves away. Wow. She points out the stark
reality of their household. She has no soap.
She has no tea. Her gown and her petticoats are
half rotten, and she doesn't have a whole stitch
in her hose. She's desperate. And then she drops
the hammer that shatters the whole illusion.
She asks him when he plans to get his work done
because, quote, Thy master wants him in today.
Thy master wants him in today. The master needs
the work. Yeah. That one line forces us to ask,
who is actually subsidizing this rebellion? Right.
It's not free. No, it's not just the frustrated
business owner footing the bill. It's the domestic
partner. The folk song lays bare a deeply unequal
domestic economy. Completely unequal. The husband's
grand stand against his employer is effectively
paid for by his wife's suffering, starvation,
and uncompensated emotional labor. That's such
a heavy realization. He gets the pitcher of ale
in the carotery, she gets rotting shoes, no basic
hygiene supplies, and the crushing stress of
the looming deadline from the master. It entirely
reframes the narrative. The craftsman's leisure
wasn't some victimless crime against capitalism.
It was a direct tax on his own family. Exactly.
Now obviously we're just looking at what the
sources tell us without taking sides, but it's
clear the fallout from this drunken absenteeism
wasn't just contained to domestic misery. No,
it spilled over. It poisoned the workplace atmosphere
for the rest of the week. There's a great observation
from the author Arnold Bennett in his 1910 novel,
Clayhanger. Oh, I love this quote. He notes that
a factory master might not be a bad man at heart,
but quote, on Tuesdays after Sunday and St. Monday.
masters were apt to be capricious. Capricious
is a very polite literary way of saying the bosses
were furious, stressed to the breaking point,
and deeply unpredictable. Right, they were losing
their minds. Because they had deadlines to meet,
supply chains to manage, and their workforce
was essentially hung over and completely unreliable
for a third of the week. So you have a society
dealing with a starving... angry wife, capricious,
volatile masters, and a chaotic, unpredictable
workforce. That level of social friction is just
unsustainable. Something had to give. And it
did. Which brings us to the death of the tradition.
How do we go from the chaos of the trap door
and the capricious masters to the highly structured,
rigid Monday through Friday week that you and
I live with today? Because society eventually
had to kill St. Monday. Right. How did they actually
do it? Well, It was a slow, deliberate execution
driven by the overwhelming engine of industrialization.
The factories? Exactly. As we move through the
19th century, the physical nature of work fundamentally
changed. We transitioned from those small, decentralized
craft workshops where a guy could make shoes
at his own pace to massive factories dominated
by heavy machinery. And the mechanics of a factory
do not allow for autonomy. Because everything
is connected. Right. If you run a textile mill
powered by a massive steam engine, That engine
requires continuous, expensive coal to run. You
cannot operate the factory profitably if 30 %
of your Loon operators decide to stay at the
pub on Monday. It just doesn't work. The machinery
demands interdependence. If three guys on the
assembly line are missing, the entire line halts,
and the factory owner's massive capital investment
bleeds money by the minute. So the random absenteeism
had to be stopped to protect the machinery and
the investment. But you couldn't just beat the
tradition out of the workers, right? Yeah. It
was a centuries old cultural institution at this
point. You really couldn't. So how did management
actually get them to show up? They realized.
They had to offer a concession. A bribe, basically.
Basically, yeah. To stop the random chaotic absenteeism
of St. Monday, employers had to officially legitimize
a window of leisure time. OK. They negotiated
a compromise by adopting half -day working on
Saturday. A half -day on Saturday. It is brilliant
in a deeply calculated sort of way. It really
is. Think about it like a pressure release valve
on a massive steam boiler. Good. Management realized
that if they didn't let a little steam out on
Saturday afternoon, the entire workforce was
going to explode and ghost them on Monday morning.
That's a great analogy. It reminds me of a modern
corporate negotiation tactic, like when management
offers casual Friday or summer Fridays where
you can log off at 3 p .m. Oh, absolutely. It
feels like this benevolent gift from leadership,
but it's really a strategy to maintain total
control and boost morale. just enough to guarantee
you'll work twice as hard the rest of the week.
Exactly. They gave up Saturday afternoon strictly
to guarantee that the workers would show up sober
and ready to operate the machines on Monday morning.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, that
pressure valve analogy is spot on. The Modern
Weekend was not a spontaneous gift from kind
-hearted factory owners. No. It was a calculated
and negotiated settlement to buy back Monday
predictability. They traded a few hours on Saturday
to kill the chaos of the work week. That's wild
to think about. And once this half -day Saturday
took hold, the wider economic culture shifted
rapidly to support it. Oh, so? Historians point
out that this is when we see the rise of organized
mass entertainments, like railway excursions
to the seaside. Oh, the day trips. Right. Initially,
railway companies actually ran these special
leisure trains on Saturday and Monday to cater
to the traditional skivers. Playing both sides.
Yeah. But as the half -day Saturday became the
sanctioned norm, the railway and the broader
leisure industry shifted their focus strictly
to the weekend. So the whole society shifted.
The entire infrastructure of fun moved away from
Monday. It's like the whole economy conspired
to herd the working class into this new officially
sanctioned window of free time. Exactly. But
surely there were holdouts, right? People who
just refused to let the tradition die. Oh, absolutely.
And the demographics of those holdouts tell us
everything we need to know about class and autonomy
during the Industrial Revolution. Who were they?
The tradition of St. Monday lasted the longest
among the better -off workers, specifically those
who were self -employed or highly specialized.
The ones with leverage. Right. These were people
who still retained some say over their own hours
and weren't economically forced to punch a clock
for a rigid factory shift. So they could afford
to keep doing it. Exactly. If you controlled
your own time and you had enough financial cushion
to survive without the master's canteen, you
kept St. Monday alive for as long as you possibly
could. Wow. It transitioned from a widespread
coping mechanism to a luxury of the autonomous
worker. That makes perfect sense. So what does
this all mean for us today? That's the big question.
Because even though the five -day work week obviously
won the war and became the global standard, the
Ghost of St. Monday never really left our cultural
consciousness. No, it's still with us. The spirit
of it pops up everywhere. You have the English
musician Billy Bragg who recorded a track literally
called St. Monday on his album England, Half
English. Great song. You have modern folk groups
like Magpie Lane still recording new vibrant
versions of the jovial Cutler. Right. And you
even have the comedian and activist Mark Thomas
who dedicated an episode of his show, The Manifesto,
to publicly calling for the return of St. Monday.
People just can't let it go. People are still
fundamentally drawn to the idea of reclaiming
that time from the machine. Well, it speaks to
a deep, lingering dissatisfaction with the rigid
structures we've inherited. Yeah, I think so
too. And I think that leaves you with a really
vital question to consider. What's that? We've
seen through all this history that the weekend,
which we treat as an unshakable natural law of
the universe, was actually just a negotiated
19th century settlement to stop workers from
hungover skeeving. Right. It was a temporary
compromise to fix a specific industrial problem,
which means the five -day week is just a treaty.
It's just a deal. It's not a law of physics.
So what current unspoken workplace rebellions
are happening right now that are going to force
the next compromise. Oh wow like the massive
uncoordinated push for remote work over the last
few years. Exactly or the phenomenon of quiet
quitting or how artificial intelligence is completely
decoupling productivity from hours worked. Right.
What chaotic unofficial habits are workers adopting
today that will eventually force society to tear
up the current calendar and create the work schedule
of the future. That is definitely something to
think about the next time your alarm goes off.
on a Monday morning. For sure. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive. We'll be back
next time to unpack another stack of sources
and find the hidden history in the world around
us. Until then, maybe take it a little easy this
week. Take care, everyone.