(CNN) – American work culture revolves around employees working eight hours a day, five days a week, a schedule immortalized by Dolly Parton in her 1980 song “9 to 5.”
Many people assume that it is simply the norm. It’s like always.
However, that wasn’t always the case. It has remained stable at this level since the Second World War.
The way the United States arrived at the eight-hour standard was not the result of a union or an industry or a company or a law. Rather, it emerged after a long and complex combination of labor policies, promotions, political commitments, pioneering employers, and economic competition.
Here’s a (very) abbreviated summary of how American society has adapted (at least for now) to an eight-hour workday.
The length of the working day over the years
In general, the length of the workday declined steadily from the 19th century until World War II, with a fairly sharp decline in the 1920s, says economic historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor at the University of Iowa.
However, the descent began at a fairly high level.
In the mid-19th century, it was common to work more than 70 hours a week, according to economist Robert Whaples, a professor at Wake Forest University, who provided a detailed timeline of the development of working hours in the United States for the Historical Association. Economically.
Since back then people generally worked six days a week, that’s around 12 hours a day.
It’s not that there weren’t examples of people investing a lot more time in the early 20th century. At the end of World War I, for example, blast furnace workers in the steel industry typically worked 84 hours per week. “These unusually long hours were the subject of many complaints and a major problem in a strike that began in September 1919. The strike failed … but four years later, US Steel reduced its workday from twelve to eight hours,” Whaples notes. .
Pioneering employers (and a six-hour workday) are making a splash
In 1926, the Ford Motor Company, under the leadership of Henry Ford, introduced a five-day, eight-hour week.
Then, during the Great Depression, the idea of a six-hour week arose due to high unemployment.
Hunnicutt’s book “Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day” tells the story of how grain baron WK Kellogg decided in 1930 to introduce six-hour shifts instead of eight-hour shifts, with workers’ wages being slightly reduced.
The move allowed Kellogg to rehire laid-off employees and hire other unemployed people. But he was also motivated by the belief that giving workers more time was a social good. Within two years, workers were starting to earn in six hours what they used to earn in eight hours, says Hunnicutt.
Kellogg’s move attracted national attention, and soon there was pressure to legislate a six-hour workday at the federal level. But a bill passed by the Senate temporarily introducing a 30-hour workweek failed in the House of Representatives.
Shortly thereafter, in 1933, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), under which employers made voluntary agreements to implement a 35- to 40-hour workweek and pay a minimum wage of US$12. Dollars came in at $15 a week. Two years later, however, the Supreme Court ruled that NIRA was unconstitutional because of a chicken slaughter provision.
Enter the Fair Labor Standards Act
Although the NIRA was invalidated, lawmakers and unions continued to push for improved working conditions. In the late 1930s, they created what would become what we know today as a five-day, eight-hour workweek nationwide, in addition to introducing a federal minimum wage and child labor protections.
In 1938, Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law, requiring employers to pay overtime to workers who worked more than 40 hours a week.
The eternal balance between time and money
Kellogg’s six-hour day, which had been popular with employees when it was introduced, did not last long. By the end of the 1950s, most workers had decided to resume an eight-hour day. Those who did not were largely women, and they maintained their six-hour schedule until the mid-1980s.
Hunnicutt interviewed several Kellogg workers about the reasons they returned to longer hours. They suggested that the need for more money would always outweigh the prospect of shorter hours, he said. They were no longer willing to trade higher salaries for shorter working hours.
“The need for more money became absolute,” Hunnicutt says. “Leisure time has been devalued, it is no longer a normal commodity, it is no longer part of progress.”
Today, of course, the trade-off between time and money is just as relevant for working adults, but with a new twist: the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way people think about how consuming work should be compared to other important parts of their lives. such as time with family.
Like many employment experts, Hunnicutt wonders if Gen Z and Millennial workers might make different choices than previous generations.
“The pandemic experience touched a nerve,” Hunnicutt says. Maybe there is a way to live my life better while doing my job. “It’s back on the table.”