Thursday Vs. Saturday — the Weekend Debate Continues
Mahmoud Ahmad, Arab NewsJEDDAH, 19 March 2006 — Saudis have long been accustomed to the fact that the Kingdom is not in sync with most of the world when it comes to weekends.
When Saudis take Thursdays and Fridays off, much of the world is working. When much of the world takes Saturday and Sunday off, Saudis are working. If you want to send a wire transfer back home, for four days of the week it is common for either the sending bank or the receiving bank to be closed. A conference call abroad is best done on the three days of the week where you (in Saudi Arabia) and your partner (in just about anywhere else) are both working.
This article from the Arab News gets right into an important issue. By being out of sych, the Saudi work week and that of most of the rest of the world don’t work well together. There is an effective three-day overlap in which everyone is working–and never mind the issue of time zones!
For those who work internationally, this is a problem. If you work attentively, it really means that you work seven days a week, because you can’t let those “my weekend, but not yours” days go to waste. And when it comes to financial institutions, where millions of dollars move in seconds, lost days are incredible lost economic opportunities.
As the article notes, the five-day work week in Saudi Arabia dates only back to the 1980s. But that’s enough to have strongly entrenched itself into the Saudi psyche.
Take a look at the article. It’s another example of a small story that actually rather important, particularly when you see that some find a religious angle involved.
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September:02:2007 - 10:50
[...] in fact, was only legally defined in the 1980s (See these earlier posts from 2006 and 2007: Tweaking the Week; Debate over Saudi Workweek [...]