Weekend Confusion
Secret Dubai has raised the issue of the Thursday/Friday vs Friday/Saturday weekend again.
The UAE adopted Thursday and Friday as the official weekend for government and schools (because how can the education ministry supervise the schools when the ministry is closed?) about five years ago. This caused lots of problems for lots of families where the breadwinner continued to have a Friday/Saturday weekend.
And it continues to cause difficulties for businesses who have lots of dealings with the rest of the world, because they only have three days a week when both parties are actually at work. I've been having a problem with this myself recently because I am working on an e-commerce project where guys from a local bank are trying to interact with a very large financial organisation in Australia. As it happens, the bank has a Friday/Saturday weekend, but that still only leaves four days a week for the stuff to get done.
Anyhoo, the comments section on SD's article is very interesting - a poster points out that both the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, and one created specially for Muslims, Pakistan, both have Saturday/Sunday weekends, with Muslim workers being given extra time off to attend Friday prayers. I was amazed to learn that!
So if it works for them, why couldn't it work here?
The UAE adopted Thursday and Friday as the official weekend for government and schools (because how can the education ministry supervise the schools when the ministry is closed?) about five years ago. This caused lots of problems for lots of families where the breadwinner continued to have a Friday/Saturday weekend.
And it continues to cause difficulties for businesses who have lots of dealings with the rest of the world, because they only have three days a week when both parties are actually at work. I've been having a problem with this myself recently because I am working on an e-commerce project where guys from a local bank are trying to interact with a very large financial organisation in Australia. As it happens, the bank has a Friday/Saturday weekend, but that still only leaves four days a week for the stuff to get done.
Anyhoo, the comments section on SD's article is very interesting - a poster points out that both the world's largest Muslim nation, Indonesia, and one created specially for Muslims, Pakistan, both have Saturday/Sunday weekends, with Muslim workers being given extra time off to attend Friday prayers. I was amazed to learn that!
So if it works for them, why couldn't it work here?
posted by Keef at
7:58 pm
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