The bloody history of the 40-hour work week — and why it's under threat again

But the history runs counter to such assumptions. In fact, the 40-hour work week was the product of generations of struggle, with more than 100 years of strikes, riots, court fights, and funerals all apparently necessary to establish what we now take for granted. You can even put a relatively precise body count to it — one that climbs into the hundreds when you add up the strikers shot by police and soldiers, the organizers hanged, the miners killed in collapses tied to literally murderous schedules. This long, bloody history looms all the more significant now, in an age in which worker protections — up to and including the 40-hour work week — are being methodically trimmed back and chipped away, while the internet itself helps blur what remains of the boundaries between life and work. If the old enemies were the factory owner and the court injunction, the new ones include algorithms that never sleep, and an economy that pressures knowledge workers and creators to produce content, with the clock never switching off. 100 years of pressure leads to law With the industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the standard work week in factories, mills, and mines — whether in the U.S. or much of Europe — ran somewhere between sixty and a hundred hours. Children as young as five and six routinely worked the same brutal shifts as adults did, on both sides of the Atlantic, from the textile mills of New England to the coal mines across Britain. Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology played a major role in the expansion of working hours. Steam-powered machines, electricity newly powering factories — each new wave of mechanization raised output and, with it, the demand that workers keep pace with machines that never got tired and never went home. The arguments against limiting work ran up against familiar concerns, too. When reformers raised the possibility of shorter hours, employers responded with the line they would keep recycling until the present day: it can't be done, the economy won't survive it. For instance, in 1927, Philadelphia carpenters struck for a ten-hour day, which at the time was considered an outrageous demand from people already working fourteen to sixteen hours. From there, the fight ground forward in fits and starts, generation by generation, with long stretches of stalemate broken by episodes of horrific violence. Two episodes in particular shaped everything that followed The first came in May of 1886, during a national push for an eight-hour day, with a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square $SQ NaN% that ended with amid bombs, police gunfire, and a wave of executions of organizers in the trials afterward. Both workers and law enforcement officers died. Out of this wreckage came May Day, now observed as International Workers’ Day in most of the world, yet now largely forgotten in the country that produced it. The second was the Pullman Strike of 1894, when railway workers walked off the job over wage cuts layered on top of unchanged twelve-hour days. President Cleveland sent federal troops. Dozens of strikers died. Even so, the deaths weren’t enough to convince governing bodies — the Great Depression had to supply the final argument. If work was scarce, spreading it across more workers made sense. So, finally, in 1938, federal law in the United States recognized the 40-hour week when the Fair Labor Standards Act finally put it on the books. And from the late 1930s through the late 1970s, the arrangement mostly held: wages tracked productivity, and unions were strong enough to defend the line. However, this stopped being true around 1980, when union membership began to crater. Productivity kept climbing, yet wages barely budged. One category at a time, salaried employees got peeled off from overtime rules. By the time Millennials entered the workforce, most people had stopped thinking of the 40-hour week as anything other than a default setting. Technology once again reshapes work, history repeats itself With the advent of modern-day gig work through Uber $UBER +0.19% and DoorDash, among many other platforms, workers have been steadily reclassified as contractors, locked out of typical protections. Similarly, where the creator economy meets the work week raises other questions without clear legal or even professional answers. Some of the most visible people in our culture may be victims of a kind — influencers for whom the vacation is content, the meal is content, and even the subsequent mental breakdown is content. They’re a fairly distinct category, of course, but the logic has migrated into many other fields too. The aesthetic nurse building her personal brand on Instagram between shifts, the novelist who is contractually obligated to have a "platform," the mid-level marketing manager who monitors TikTok around the clock for trends — all of them are working when they are, technically, not working, and raising the question, once again, of where this all ends. Perhaps this is simply history repeating itself: Technology advances, workloads expanding, workers eventually fighting for limits, the limits getting written into law, the next generation assuming the law was always there, while employers spend the intervening decades working around it until the pressure becomes unbearable and the cycle starts all over again. Perhaps we’re again in the late stages of such a loop. None of these protections set themselves up the first time, and nothing in the historical record suggests they reset on their own.