Forty-hour work week

The movement for shorter working hours traces to the earliest decades of industrialization. In the early nineteenth century, factory workers in the United States and Britain commonly worked ten to sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer turned labor reformer, coined the phrase that would define the movement's goal in 1817, proposing eight hours for labor, eight hours for recreation, and eight hours for rest. The slogan spread, but progress was slow and uneven for decades.

Labor organizing intensified after the American Civil War. In 1867, Illinois passed one of the first eight-hour-day laws, though enforcement loopholes rendered it largely symbolic. On May 1, 1886, unions across the country called a general strike for the eight-hour day, centered in Chicago, where the Haymarket affair turned a labor demonstration into a violent confrontation that shaped the movement's trajectory for years. Incremental victories followed over the next four decades, with some industries and employers voluntarily shortening hours while others resisted fiercely.

Henry Ford provided a landmark corporate precedent in 1926, when Ford Motor Company adopted a five-day, forty-hour work week with no reduction in pay. Ford's decision was driven by his research showing that longer hours produced only small, short-lived gains in productivity. Other large manufacturers gradually followed, but voluntary adoption remained limited. The decisive moment came during the Great Depression, when Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member in United States history and Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, championed federal working-hour legislation as part of the New Deal.

Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, initially capping the work week at forty-four hours and requiring overtime pay beyond that threshold. The act was amended in 1940 to reduce the standard to forty hours, the figure that has remained United States law for more than eight decades. The law applied initially to industries representing roughly twenty percent of the labor force, with coverage expanding over subsequent decades.