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UAE Changes Weekends To Saturday-Sunday

Source: Emirates News Agency (WAM)
Posted: Tuesday, December 7, 2021

The UAE's Minister of Human Resources and Emiratisation, Abdulrahman al-Awar, has announced that, effective January 1, 2022, the United Arab Emirates will shift to a working week of four and half days with a Saturday-Sunday weekend "to better align its economy with global markets".

As a consequence of the aforementioned shift in UAE weekends, the UAE government has announced that Sunday, January 2, 2022, would be an official public holiday in the UAE.

Fifteen years ago, the UAE had shifted its Thursday-Friday weekends to Friday-Saturday (2006-08-15 and 2006-05-31). As is the case in today's announcement, the new Friday-Saturday weekends were optional for private sector companies, but these were expected to follow the public sector and, indeed this is what they did.

Over the past 2 decades, other Muslim countries and states have also switched weekends (2014-09-12, 2013-11-23, 2013-07-28, 2013-04-22, 2013-04-06, 2012-01-09, 2009-07-24, 2007-12-13, 2007-08-04, 2006-08-02 and 2001-03-14).


Links and References


Below are links to the news stories referred to in the above "UAE Changes Weekends To Saturday-Sunday" news story, as well as links to subsequents news stories which refer to the present news story.