Two years later, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the NIRA was unconstitutional due to a provision pertaining to the slaughter of chickens.ĭespite the NIRA being invalidated, lawmakers and unions continued to push for better labor conditions. Soon after, in 1933, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the National Industrial Recovery Act, under which employers entered into voluntary agreements to institute 35- to 40-hour workweeks and pay a minimum wage of $12 to $15 a week. But a bill aiming to temporarily institute a 30-hour workweek, which passed in the Senate, failed in the House. Kellogg’s move attracted national attention, and soon there was a push to federally legislate a six-hour workday. Within two years, workers had begun earning in six hours what they used to earn working eight, Hunnicutt said. But he was also motivated by a conviction that giving more time back to workers was a social good. The move let Kellogg hire back employees who had been let go and hire other unemployed people.
The state of return-to-office policies: a post-Labor Day reset? In the mid-1800s, working 70-plus hours a week was common, according to economist Robert Whaples, a professor at Wake Forest University, who created a detailed timeline on the evolution of hours worked in the United States for the Economic History Association.Ī midsection of group of business people walking in corridor office building. Generally speaking, there was a steady decline in the length of the workday from the 1800s through World War II, with a fairly steep drop during the 1920s, said economic historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor at the University of Iowa.īut the descent began from a fairly high level. Here is a (highly) abbreviated rundown of how US society settled (so far anyway) on an eight-hour workday. Rather it came about after a long and complex mix of labor actions, advocacy, political compromises, pioneering employers and economic competition. How the United States landed on the eight-hour standard wasn’t the result of one union or one industry, one company or one law.
It has just held steady at that level since World War II.
Same as it ever was.Įxcept, it wasn’t always so. US work culture revolves around employees putting in eight hours a day, five days a week - a schedule immortalized by Dolly Parton in her 1980 song “9 to 5.”
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