In 1884 trade unions were demanding that work days be reduced from the typical 10-12 hours (6 days a week) down to a maximum of 8 hours. They set a deadline of May 1, 1886. When that deadline wasn’t met, they held a peaceful protest in Chicago. On May 3rd, angry striking workers pushed toward some gates to confront strikebreakers / scabs. The police fired on the strikers, killing 6. The next day, there was a rally at Haymarket Square. At night, the police came in force to try to disperse the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police, killing one of them and severely wounding others. The police fired on the crowd, and some protesters fired back. At least 4 people were killed and at least 70 injured.
The result of all this, including the unfair trials, executions, pardons, etc. was a lot of attention to the 8-hour workday movement.
In 1890, the unions planned for another strike with the goal being the 8-hour work day. This time, with the help of the second Communist International, it went worldwide. The riot in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1 became a rallying cry for workers worldwide, and ever since then that has been the International Workers Day. But, in the US, the fact it was associated with communism was too scary, so the US celebration of Labour was moved to Sept 1st. Instead of International Workers Day, on May 1 the US celebrates (I kid you not) “Loyalty Day” and “Law Day” – extremely rich given that the thing that kicked it off was a time when there was a bloody confrontation between cops and labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
A couple of decades later in the 1910s, as unions continued to push for an 8-hour work day, Henry Ford went with the 8-hour day in his factories, and that was so influential that it eventually became the norm.
The 5 day work week came after the 8 hour day. It was partially the result of Henry Ford deciding that it was more beneficial to give his workers 2 days off. It was also influenced by a cotton mill employing both Jewish and Christian workers arranging work schedules so each group could have its sabbath off. Once Ford made that rule, unions pushed extremely hard to make it a standard thing, but again, it took decades. It wasn’t until 1940 that the Fair Labor Standards Act in the US made a 40 hour work week mandatory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workweek_and_weekend
The point of all this?
The 40-hour work week was never “designed”. People fought and died to make it a reality.
People, mostly in unions, frequently communists, fought and died to gradually reduce the number of hours that workers were expected to work. In the mid 1800s the expectation was 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. It took decades of fighting to get that down to 6 days of only 8 hours. It took decades more fighting to get it down to 5 days a week rather than 6 or 5.5. It was never something that was “designed”. It was something that took decades of battle.
White families in the US after WWII were the first to really benefit from a law which had gone into place just before the US entered the war. Those families benefited from decades of work from labour unions and communists to get the work week down to only 40 hours. Then, the economic boom the US received from being the only major country to come out of WWII with its infrastructure essentially untouched meant that for the first time, maybe ever, working-class families were living relatively comfortable lives. The man in the family went to work for the legal maximum 40 hours, and still earned enough to support a whole family without his wife needing to work outside the home.
What has happened since then isn’t that the “designed” system failed. It’s that the post-war economic boom ended as other countries recovered. It’s that the labour unions got weak, and the capitalists started squeezing again. The 40-hour work week is still theoretically the law of the land. It’s just that take-home pay has been stalled for decades as the cost of living has gone up.
Don’t get me wrong, workers today still live better than the workers did in the mid 1800s when a work week was something like 60-80 hours. But, because labour unions got weak, and communism was demonized, there was nobody to oppose the owners of capital as they found new ways to squeeze their employees. So, even with a 40 hour week, things have been getting worse.
The history of the 40 hour week is also important because it shows what’s going to be needed if people want to work less than 40 hours. People are going to need strong unions. They’re going to need to go on strike. They’re going to need to get hurt and maybe killed by the cops who will side with the bosses. And, once enough blood has been spilled, maybe there will be reforms. Complaining about it on social media and thinking that we just need to “design” a new mutually beneficial arrangement is missing the whole point.
The 5 day work […] was also influenced by a cotton mill employing both Jewish and Christian workers arranging work schedules so each group could have its sabbath off.
And if we all got Friday off too, that would be convenient for the Muslims.
Now to find a group that needs Mondays off…
Thank you for continuing this history that the US education system never taught me.
Thank you putting this together.
This is a great reminder, thanks for posting.
Very nice write up! Thanks for sharing it and taking the time to write it.
I am french and may first is a public holiday, but I’m ashamed that I didn’t know from where it came… Thanks for the write up!
One thing I like about WFH is that I can do the chores and stuff during the day. Take a break every hour or two is healthy, and using that time to do laundry or dishes or a quick errand means I have a lot more time in the evening and on weekends
And even that was a compromise from just working until you drop. People organized and died for the 40-hour workweek.
Literally got on trains, headed into West Virginia, shot at each other, stormed machine gun pillboxes, and got bombed. If it weren’t for those people we’d still be in labor camps
Pinkertons murdering workers at Carnegie Steel
The same Pinkertons that were sent after some guy who grabbed a few Magic the Gathering cards?
He didn’t even grab them, he was sent the wrong box by the warehouse by mistake.
So true. People seem to have convinced themselves that 35/40 hour weeks was some kind of ideal or agreed amount of hours we all found to be the best balance of all things.
Nope, it used to be 60, until people fought back and made them reduce the hours they’re forced to work for other people’s profit.
The problem is, we stopped fighting back.
It was a measure enacted during wartimes to increase productivity, or at least that’s what they said, because it was never rolled back to pre-war even after the US was no longer engaged.
Always beware what they try to slip through under the guise of patriotism and “unity.”
Yeah then women entered the workforce and employers were like, “yayyy! Now we have doubled the labor pool. We can pay people half as much by not increasing real wages for 40 years.”
This is exactly why I liked Elizabeth Warren, she seemed to be the only politician talking about the major issue with tracking “family income” as opposed to individual incomes…
I’ve been single for the last decade, at this point I know it is permanent. I will never have a second income. I do not enjoy living in someone else’s garage as I near 40 years old… Whatever OPs image has to say, I still feel like a complete failure as societal expectations of an “adult” are pretty much everything I don’t have.
You could get a roommate.Or not i guess
Is this not a good-faith suggestion? If you’re going to disagree at least explain your downvote. I had roommates post-thirty and it improved my living situation drastically.
I expect they probably have the same ideology I have, that this statement is very simple minded and throws very big well “you could just marry someone rich” vibes
Like yes the comment is genuine but it isn’t reflecting on the fact that what the person is commenting on is the fact that societal expectations is that households required 2 income sources, which is polar opposite of what the society was built on where you used to be able to build a house and have a comfortable living with one income Source in the house, and now you can have two income sources in the house and still struggle to make ends meet. (hence the ideology of a minimum household wage instead of a min wage per individual)
Take my grandfather for example his house is currently equated at 300,000, he paid 14,000 when he bought it, this was with a stay-at-home wife and a household of four kids. My grandfather was a teacher, so on a teacher’s salary he was able to afford that house and support his kids and his wife all with him being the only one who worked in the house. I believe that’s the point that the commenter was trying to get at and it’s likely why other people down voted that response. “Just get a roommate” doesn’t address the actual issue at hand, it’s a temporary solution to a hard set problem.
But that is just how I see it,
the working class should have better living conditions, especially in modern times where worker productivity is multiple times higher than post-WW2 technology allowed even after accounting for the higher tech level required for modern society
why not simply lower your living conditions?
Ironic how the one arguing in bad faith is the one complaining about it.
We have to be in the office 5 days a week. My boss who is a boomer/late gen X gets annoyed when people aren’t “butts in their seats 9-5”. I’m a Xellenial and really don’t care when my guys are in as long as they get things done. I keep telling him the more rigid he is with time, the more likely we are to lose good people. We’re already on thin ice with 5 days in office and have been losing people. It’s a constant fight that I have to shield them as much as possible from.
In a team meeting I had a while back my lead was talking about making sure we don’t get burnout. I asked if our department could trial run a 4 day work week. Their answer was “company won’t allow that but if you get all your work done by Friday I won’t ask questions if you’re not online”. Productivity and morale immediately went up. Good leads shield their team from the bullshit thank you
As a software deceloper I struggle to understand that phrase “if you get all work done”. That will never be the case for me, because (1) there is always more work and (2) we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster. That means we are always moving work from one into the next sprint. You are never done early enough to quit even a quarter of a day early.
we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster.
That means you have a project manager who doesn’t understand how sprints are supposed to work, and he’s hurting the entire team because of it. You guys will get burnt out, productivity will be shit, and the good people will leave. I’d encourage you to talk to them, or their boss if they don’t listen.
I mean, that’s true, but the point still stands - every first Friday of a sprint there is ALWAYS going to be work to be done.
And what if they’re doing Kanban?
The point is, Fridays off shouldn’t ever be dependent on “all work being done”.
You should be able to tell by the first Friday if you’re on-track to finish your sprint without working Fridays. You can’t tell now because you’re overloaded.
I’m really not overloaded, I have a very agile team and we usually don’t take more than we can manage.
But saying you can always, with 100% certainty predict what blockers may arise in the whole next week is a kind of clairvoyance I’m not sure is possible. If it was, we wouldn’t need daily standups in that second week.
And, once again, Kanban is a thing.
Please, let’s just not use “all work being done” as a metric for time off.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, legislators granted special powers to the president, and now he’s proposing extending the work day to 12 hours.
As true ancap would do
You’re right, of course, but 🤮
Been saying for a while now, 20hr full time workweek makes a lot more sense.
Since the 1970s productivity has skyrocketed while wages have remained stagnant. If they don’t want to pay us more, fine I guess, but something has to give.
The critical nuance here is that in America, vitally important healthcare services are tied to your full time employment status. Hey, repugnantcons and turbolibs: if you want us to have more babies, might be time to reconsider this policy entirely.
This such a huge point that no one in my life besides my fiance and I seem to harp on. Health insurance being tied directly to your employment is fucking dystopian. It absolutely crushes your ability to protest, strike, fight for rights against your employer, etc. because that can jeopardize your access to healthcare. It makes it so you can’t even risk leaving a bad situation at work because they give you healthcare and if the grass isn’t greener at some new job or a different lifestyle doesn’t work out…then there’s no guarantee you can get your job back and get healthcare from them.
It’s an abusive relationship for them to hold your well-being over your head and restrict what you can do in life so much.
Remember when everyone was getting paid at the start of COVID to not be at work?? Biggest protests in my life happened all over the country for BLM.
Eh, I think 30hr is totally fine. Just make it a 4-day work week and I’ll probably get about the same amount of work done.
vitally important healthcare services are tied to your full time employment status
Insurance, yes. And I think that’s completely BS, how much or where you work should have zero impact on your health insurance. Your employer shouldn’t get to pick it, you should get to pick it. If we can separate insurance from employment, I think workers will be a lot less hesitant to leave crappy jobs…
I used to work 3 12s. Basically open to close 3 days a week at the store I worked at. I miss it so much. I don’t care if I have to work long days if it means I get more days off. I had so much more time to work on personal projects due thanks to all the flexibility that provided.
To say nothing of the massively increased productivity of modern workers (who now pay to get “trained” in college, instead of having business train employees on the company’s dime).
It’s also the death of the Third Places
https://medium.com/illumination/the-death-of-third-places-and-the-evolution-of-communities-5bbffc01c5eI view college as training for dealing with deadlines and some logic practice (e.g. this essay isn’t coherent; math exam next Wednesday). I never see people come through the door ready to go… it takes a few weeks before even the most basic tasks can be delegated. Their writing still sucks 90% of the time, and their math is usually shaky (lucky we have automated many steps with computers.)
I agree that the pace at which all this goes is exhausting and more breaks are needed, but the third world is still full of people working overtime to overtake these “professional” jobs that colleges purport to prep workers for. Don’t go to an overpriced Ivy League school and take on debt and expect a 20h week… go to a govt sponsored school and be prepared to compete with the remote workers working for the company that is undercutting your employer. Welcome to globalization.
This is why working from home needs to be more normalized. The corporations have made the market impossible to bear unless you have more than one income. Without the ability to work from home (ideally flex hours), then basically your house goes to shit. You don’t have any free time if it doesn’t.
Your “choice” after putting in a full day of work for enough money to buy a portion of your groceries, is to come home and do everything that your stay at home partner (now, working a full time job), would have otherwise done (basically speed running burnout, any%), or actually relax and accept that your house will always be somewhat messy.
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We’re seeing the race to the bottom that is inevitable under capitalism, unless there’s some form of outside intervention.
When it was the norm for a single person in a household to work, wages had to be sufficient to support a household with a single source of income. Men almost always earned significantly more than women; it was assumed that a working woman was either supplementing income, or not taking care of a household, and it was assumed that a working man needed to care for a household. As women started to enter the workforce in greater numbers in the 50s and 60s, you see household incomes start inching higher; as incomes increase, prices increase to meet the available income. Rising prices leads to more women entering the workforce, because a single income is no longer sufficient to meet the requirements for a household. By the time you get to the late 80s, it’s nearly impossible to have a family on a single income. Now a two income household can barely afford to even have an apartment, much less have a family.
Now you have people working a day job, and working gig jobs for secondary income, to ‘get ahead’. Eventually that will be the new normal, just what is necessary to keep up with prices.
Without putting capitalism on a very short leash, this is only going to get worse.
40 hour week is a loss for both sides anyway. 32 hour week has superior results.
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I’ll add to this: it was also from an age where necessities were fairly readily available at basic income levels (in most cities) and through a lifetime you could get ahead and upgrade your house along the way while supporting a family on a single person’s income.
Now you can have two people making a decent income and still have issues affording rent/mortgage. Necessities have gone up significantly while stuff like TVs have become cheaper but also shorter-lived.
Are TVs and things really shorter lived? I remember my parents having theirs forever, but I was like 8 years old. Everything felt like forever. That 21" TV that lasted most of my childhood was probably only about six or seven years old when they swapped it out for a bigger one.
Meanwhile as an adult my TV still feels new because I remember paying for it, but it is already 7 years old. And I’m not thinking of replacing it yet.
For computers I had a Spectrum +3 which felt like I had it for a lifetime, but looking at release dates for that and what I replaced it with, I must have used it for 5 years tops, and the same for the Amiga 1200 I replaced it with. Modern consoles have about a 7 year lifespan. They’re cheaper too, when you take inflation into account.
Housing is fucked. Although I do think too many people have this weird idea that they need to live in big cities or popular areas. You can live in a smaller place. They have electricity, internet and food. You’ll survive.
