Rush hour, lunch hour, happy hour — not so long ago, anyone who worked in Lower Manhattan could tell you what time it was. From 7 to 9 in the morning, men and women streamed toward their offices. Between 5 and 7 in the evening, they streamed home again, maybe stopping by a bar on the way. Then the pandemic hit. The office towers emptied out. Work went on, but from living rooms, dining rooms and bedrooms, over the internet. People had worked from home for years, but not on this scale. Before the pandemic, the rhythms of the day, at least for office workers, were mostly unchanged for a hundred years. But now the industrial-era social compact that governed how we experienced the working day for generations is breaking down. The terms of that compact are so familiar to us that we almost never name them: Labor should be measured by time, in hours and days; people should be paid the same amount for the same work; the day should be broken into periods of labor and leisure.

In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, requiring that almost all employees be paid a minimum wage per hour, with a 50 percent bonus for overtime after 44 hours in a week. Now updated but still the law of the land, the act formally ratified the division of work time from free time. Until recently, the physical distance between workplace and home helped guarantee these terms. The commute enforced a boundary between professional and personal time that millions observed every day. So, too, did the...

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