In a lot of American towns, Saturday is Saturday. In Baytown, Saturday might be your Tuesday. The plants along the bay run day and night, nearly every day of the year, and so do the people who keep them running. Many families here plan birthdays and ball games around a rotating schedule, not around the calendar on the wall.
So it is worth asking: what is a weekend for? And what do you do when you don't get one?
Where the 40-hour week came from
The weekend was not handed down. It was argued for, one fight at a time, by workers, unions, employers and lawmakers.
In 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. For workers it covered, it set 44 hours a week as the line for overtime pay, then stepped it down: 42 hours the next year, and 40 hours by 1940. That 40-hour line is still the federal rule for overtime today. The law did not promise anyone Saturday and Sunday off. It promised that if you work past 40 hours, someone pays extra for it.
That is an important difference. The law protects your pay. It does not protect your rest. Rest is something people have to guard for themselves.
Two kinds of time off
There is time off that is just recovery. You come home from a 12-hour shift and you sleep, eat and get ready to do it again. That is necessary, but it is not the whole thing.
Then there is a different kind of time. In 1948 a German philosopher named Josef Pieper wrote a short book about it. In English it is called Leisure: The Basis of Culture, and the English edition came out in 1952 with an introduction by the poet T. S. Eliot. Pieper argued that leisure is not laziness and not just a break from work. It is a kind of quiet, open attention and celebration: time given to things worth doing for their own sake, including worship. In everyday terms, that might mean thinking, praying, talking with friends, playing music or looking at the sky. Things nobody pays you for.
He pointed out that the old Greek word for leisure was scholē. It is where our word "school" comes from. To the Greeks, the time free from work was the time you used to learn and to become a better person.
The day of rest
Pieper was writing in a long tradition. Many religions set aside a day of rest. For Jews it is the Sabbath; for many Christians it is Sunday; Muslims gather for Friday prayer. The idea underneath is that a person is more than a worker. One day out of seven, you stop producing and remember what the producing is for.
You don't have to share any faith to see the point. A life that is only work and recovery from work is missing something.
When your weekend is a Wednesday
Here is the practical problem. If you work rotating shifts, your days off move. Your friends are at work when you are free. Your kids are in school. Church, the game, the family dinner all happen on days you may be asleep or on the unit.
People in Baytown handle this in a lot of ways. Some families hold a "Sunday dinner" on whatever day everyone is home. Some workers protect one morning on each set of days off for something that is not chores: fishing at the bay, a long breakfast, time with a book. Some trade shifts to make the big days, like graduations, and let the small ones go.
None of it is perfect. But the lesson from Pieper still holds. Rest is not only the hours you are not working. It is what you choose to do with some of them.
A question to take with you
Look at your next days off. How many hours are already spoken for: sleep, errands, the yard, the truck? Now pick one hour that you will spend on something that does not need to be done at all. Something you would do even if nobody ever saw it.
That hour is your weekend, whatever day it falls on.
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Sources
- Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, section 7(a) (44, 42 and 40 hours), as summarized by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Economic Policy Institute, "Celebrating 75 years of the Fair Labor Standards Act."
- Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (German edition Muße und Kult, 1948; English edition 1952, translated by Alexander Dru, introduction by T. S. Eliot).