Five days on and two days off – that’s what life looks like for most Americans. However, the 40-hour, five-day work week was not introduced until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. This law was the culmination of more than a century of struggle by American workers for shorter working hours, better wages and safer working conditions.
“At the turn of the 20th century, it was not uncommon for most Americans to work 60 hours or more a week,” says Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University.
In 1898, Massachusetts published a “labor bulletin” listing the wages and hours of domestic workers in the state. Domestic cooks at the time worked between 78 and 83 hours a week for about 9 cents an hour. They had Sundays off and sometimes a half day on Saturdays. Some factory workers in Massachusetts were a little better off; state law limited women and children to working a maximum of 58 hours a week in textile factories.
The 8-hour clockwork from the 19th century
“In many ways, the idea of limiting working hours and days goes back to the beginnings of the American labor movement,” says Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.
The battle cry of the 19th-century labor movement was “Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours rest,” a phrase first coined by Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer turned labor reformer.
The 8-Hour Movement gained momentum after the Civil War, as soldiers returned to their rapidly industrializing cities. They were joined by millions of former slaves fighting for fair wages and humane working conditions.
Chicago was a hotbed of labor activism in the mid-19th century. Chicago workers, exhausted by the typical 12- or 14-hour workday, were among the first to successfully lobby state officials in 1867 to impose an eight-hour limit on Illinois workers. Unfortunately, Illinois law had loopholes that allowed employers to negotiate more hours, rendering it ineffective.
The next major upsurge came on May 1, 1886, when Chicago unions and political activists called for a nationwide “May Day” strike for the eight-hour day. More than 10,000 people gathered in Chicago for what was supposedly a peaceful demonstration. Tensions between strikers and police escalated, leading to the deaths of four protesters. In response, rioters and anarchists took to the streets on May 4, a violent confrontation that ended with a deadly bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square.
The “Haymarket Affair” of 1886 was a painful setback for the 8-hour clock movement, which only fully recovered after the First World War.
After the First World War, shorter working days become more common
In 1916, when politicians were debating entry into World War I, over 400,000 American railroad workers threatened to strike unless they were granted an eight-hour day. The massive nationwide strike would have paralyzed American industrial production on the eve of war.
When negotiations between the railroads and striking workers failed, President Woodrow Wilson and Congress intervened to avert a national crisis. The result was the Adamson Act of 1916, the first federal law to mandate an eight-hour day, albeit for a single industry.
When the United States finally entered the war in 1917, the resulting labor shortages gave workers a stronger basis for demanding shorter hours and work weeks.
“In the first six months of American involvement in the war, there were more strikes in the United States than in any other period in American history before,” says McCartin, co-author of Work in America: A History.
Fearing that strikes would slow production of critical war equipment, President Wilson created the National War Labor Board to intervene in labor disputes and compel employers to recognize collective bargaining. The result was a brief “golden age” for American workers in 1917 and 1918, which also saw widespread adoption of the eight-hour day.
When the war ended on November 11, 1918, industrialists tried to undo workers’ gains by increasing working hours, but they met with fierce resistance. Emboldened American workers organized 3,000 strikes in 2019, involving more than 4 million workers.
“Employers realized that the genie had been let out of the bottle during the war and could not be fully put back,” says McMartin. “They could not return to the status quo and try to force workers to work as they had before the war.”
Henry Ford creates an industry standard
In 1913, Henry Ford’s Highland Park plant was the first to use the company’s groundbreaking assembly line technology. While the assembly line could produce cars much faster and cheaper than ever before, it was also backbreaking, monotonous work. Within months of opening, workers were quitting so quickly that turnover at Highland Park reached 380 percent.
“Ford was struggling with what many other industries were struggling with at the time: massive turnover,” says Loomis. “These jobs were terrible and nobody wanted to stay there. He decided to embrace the ideas of scientific management and make a deal with the workforce.”
Ford’s irresistible offer was an 8-hour workday for $5 – nearly double the pay for less work than before. As part of the deal, Highland Park workers had to agree to inspections by the company’s “Sociology Department,” which required workers to drink alcohol or read “radical” (pro-union) literature.
As early as 1922, the Ford Motor Company took steps to introduce a 40-hour work week – five 8-hour days and a two-day weekend. “Every person,” said Edsel Ford, the son of the company’s founder, “needs more than one day a week for rest and relaxation.”
The decision was about more than just happy workers, McMartin says. It was part of an economic philosophy that later became known as “Fordism.” In Fordism, mass production requires mass consumption. Ford wanted his workers to be well paid and well rested so they would use their free time to buy more things, including his cars.
In 1926, Ford officially introduced the five-day, 40-hour work week. Since Ford was the most influential industrialist of his time, other large companies followed his example.
The 40-hour week becomes law
“Although a leading automaker like Ford certainly influenced how other business leaders operated their companies, the 40-hour workweek was not widely adopted until the government made it law,” says McMartin. “And that happened with Roosevelt and the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression. Unemployment was at 25 percent—one in four Americans was unemployed. To meet this incredible challenge, FDR appointed Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labor. Perkins was the first female cabinet member in U.S. history and a dedicated advocate for workers’ rights.
Frances Perkins in 1933.
Together with their allies in Congress, Roosevelt and Perkins passed the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. This sweeping New Deal legislation addressed the most pressing labor issues of the time. It set a federal minimum wage of $12 to $15 a week, banned child labor under the age of 16, and limited the work week to 40 hours.
But the groundbreaking labor law did not survive. In 1935, the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. Perkins and FDR spent the next three years battling courts and critics in Congress to regain the lost gains. A major victory came in 1936 with the Public Contracts Act, a law that required most federal contractors to work a 40-hour work week.
Finally, in 1938, FDR and Perkins succeeded in passing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The original version of the law limited the working week to 44 hours. It also created the first nationwide rules for overtime pay. For all hours worked in excess of 44 hours, workers were paid one and a half times the regular hourly rate.
The FLSA stipulated that the work week should be reduced to 42 hours after one year and to 40 hours after two years. The 40-hour, five-day work week has been the standard in America ever since.
