You know that feeling when you show up to work Friday morning at 8 a.m., but your brain is fried from endless meetings so you stare blankly at your computer screen thinking of your weekend plans?
It’s a feeling dozens of companies are seeking to avoid after participating in the world’s largest trial of a four-day workweek.
By the mid-1800s, workers were commonly putting in 70-hour, six-day weeks.
“Industrialization was radically transforming the nature of work, drawing in not only millions of immigrants and former slaves into the world of wage work, but also former subsistence farmers,” Joel Suarez, a labor historian and assistant professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, told Sidekick.
In 1886, more than 300,000 industrial workers across the country went on strike to demand an eight-hour work day. In the “Haymarket Affair” in Chicago, many workers and police were wounded or killed.
The U.S. government started tracking hours in 1890, finding the average time worked by manufacturing employees was 100 hours. From there, in1916, Congress passed the Adamson Act. That law established an eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers.
The Ford Motor Company began testing a shortened workweek from six to five days in 1922, with the five-day, 40 hour, week becoming permanent four years later.
In 1938, Congress limited the workweek to 44 hours with the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Franklin...
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