New York CNN —
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.”
It’s just the norm, many assume. Same as it ever was.
Except, it wasn’t always so. It has just held steady at that level since World War II.
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. Rather it came about after a long and complex mix of labor actions, advocacy, political compromises, pioneering employers and economic competition.
Here is a (highly) abbreviated rundown of how US society settled (so far anyway) on an eight-hour workday.
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.
But the descent began from a fairly high level.
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.
Given that people typically worked six days a week back then, that comes out to roughly 12 hours a day.
Not that there weren’t examples in the early 20th century of people putting in far more time than that....
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