Rally for 5-day weekends comes to Atlanta
By TAMMY JOYNER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/24/07
"Thank God It’s Tuesday."
If Atlantan Roy McCrerey has his way, American workers would be uttering that phrase as they prepare for their weekly five-day weekends.
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The Friends of the Five Day Weekend explain their cause at the group’s Web site.
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"In my dream world, the jerk boss is going to be the guy who makes you come in on Wednesdays," said McCrerey, an actor who lives in Virginia-Highland. McCrerey is head of a quirky campaign to shorten the nation’s workweek to two days. The "Friends of the Five-Day Weekend" movement kicked off in Asheville, N.C., last week and was in Atlanta’s Woodruff Park on Tuesday. The rally, which drew about 90 people, featured bands, balloons and free giveaways.
"Maybe our message is a little crazy," said McCrerey, who works about two days a week.
"But my response to that is our current situation is crazy. We need to fight crazy with crazy."
He said a two-day workweek may be a stretch, but he insists the nation’s economy could still function with fewer workdays.
Except for going from six to five days, the American workweek hasn’t changed much since the Great Depression, when the weekend was officially created. Americans already have one of the shortest vacation times in the world: 14 days on average. They give up nearly 570 million days of unused vacation a year, according to the latest vacation deprivation survey by Expedia.com.
Cellphones, BlackBerrys, instant messages and other technologies that were supposed to make our lives easier have instead tethered us to work even more, McCrerey said.
Workers have been going to work lured by the promise of shorter weeks for nearly a century, he said. It has yet to happen.
"In fact, it’s going the other direction," McCrerey said.
Americans’ obsession with work flies in the face of the early days of the country, when the founders cobbled together the Declaration of Independence’s most famous line: "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The idea of a five-day weekend drew a flurry of comments on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Web site Tuesday.
"All these people talking about hard work … what’s so virtuous about slaving away for some penny-ante job? How is that of superior moral value than, say, having more time to expand your mind and spend time with loved ones?" one reader wrote.
"If I could work two 15-hour days and get the rest of the week off, YAY! I’d rather be with my family, or gardening, or reading, or writing … than working at my job … and I LOVE my job. I just don’t love it more than I love my family or myself."
The idea started as a promotional gimmick by the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is spending more than $600,000 on the campaign. It was intended to get more people to spend their vacations in Asheville, but the concept has mushroomed into a full-blown campaign, with its own Web site, rallies and a petition to Congress that’s already drawn nearly 1,000 signatures.
Congress, by the way, is in session 110 days a year, which is roughly — you guessed it — two days a week.
The response to the movement has stunned McCrerey.
"We’ve just been floored by the response," he said. "I was expecting to get a lot of, ‘Are you nuts?’ Instead I’m hearing, ‘It’s about time.’ I was expecting to hear more resistance. We’ve hit a nerve here."
