Today workers take for granted that a standard work week has 40 hours, spread over five days. There are variations of that formula, of course, and some percentage of workers work a certain amount of overtime, as well. A 40-hour working week is a relatively recent practice, though.
The U.S. had a few limited eight-hour-day laws that went on the books not long after the Civil War. In 1867, one was passed in the state of Illinois, and another was passed the following year that covered certain federal employees, but enforcement was weak, and most people were still working 10 and 12 hour days, especially in manufacturing. So how did our present model come about, then?
In 2015, Politifact was sent a meme that gave the credit for our forty-hour, five-day work week not to labor unions, but to Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, and was asked to check it out. This is what they found.
The first big push for an eight-hour limit to the working day came to prominence in 1884, and called for all workers to have an eight-hour work day by May 1, 1886. The deadline wasn’t met, so labor leaders began calling for demonstrations to emphasize the issue.
In 1914, Henry Ford made the announcement that he was raising the wages of all his male workers from $2.34 to $5 an hour, more than doubling their current hourly rate, and scaling back from their then-48-hour work week to a 40-hour work week.
Ford believed that overworking employees was bad for their productivity, and giving them more down time without compromising their financial well-being would help increase worker loyalty and commitment to Ford Motor Company.
Other companies started to emulate Ford’s policies about working hours when they saw that Ford Motor Company’s profits nearly doubled over the subsequent two years.
Ford’s reasons for making those changes had other, less employee-focused motivations as well, though. In a 1926 interview with Henry Ford in World’s Work, it suggests that his motivations were also capital driven.
From Left to Right: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, the three partners of the Edison Botanic Research Corporation.
