A century of strikes, riots, and one executive order produced the schedule most workers take for granted.
In 1866, the National Labor Union became the first American organization to call for an eight-hour workday, passing a resolution declaring that "the first and great necessity of the present to free labor of this country from capitalist slavery" was a law limiting work to eight hours.1 At the time, twelve- to sixteen-hour days were common in factories, and child labor was routine.
On May 1, 1886, unions across the United States called a general strike for the eight-hour day. In Chicago, the strike culminated in the Haymarket affair, when a bomb killed seven police officers and an unknown number of civilians, setting back the labor movement by years.2
The five-dollar day that Henry Ford introduced in 1914 included an eight-hour shift, creating three shifts per day and enabling continuous production. Ford later adopted a five-day, forty-hour week for his factories in 1926.3
In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the maximum workweek at forty-four hours with overtime pay requirements. Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member in U.S. history, was instrumental in drafting the legislation.4
Congress amended the FLSA in 1940, reducing the maximum workweek from forty-four to forty hours. A century of labor organizing, strikes, violent confrontations, and legislative battles had produced the schedule that most American workers now treat as a natural fact of life.5
Robert Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer turned labor reformer, had coined the rallying cry of the movement in 1817: "Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest."6 The eight-hour day was the division of the day into three equal parts, a mathematical proposition that took 123 years to become law in the United States.