LM Otero/AP Photo
A worker rides a railcar at a BNSF rail crossing in Saginaw, Texas, September 14, 2022.
Strikes for an eight-hour workday spread like wildfire in the years leading up to May 1, 1886. From bricklayers and carpenters to textile workers and plumbers, workers proclaimed their right to participate in political and social life, to take care of their families, and to have a decent amount of leisure time.
On May 1, Lucy Parsons and her husband Albert helped lead 80,000 workers down Michigan Avenue in Chicago as demonstrations and strikes shut down other cities across the country. An ex-slave who had fled Texas as the racist Redemption government took over the South, Lucy joined the Women Workers Union and the Eight-Hour Association upon moving to Chicago. Albert was hanged a year later along with three other labor leaders when the state government, without evidence, blamed them for a bomb that exploded in Haymarket Square May 4.
May 1 would be memorialized as International Workers’ Day by working people across the globe. But while many Americans have come to expect an eight-hour workday, it is not reality for a surprising share of the population. Of the 38 wealthiest countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. is one of only four that has no statutory limit on the workweek. And workers in fields as varied as health care, technology, transportation, entertainment, and more endure extremely long workdays.
How did we get to the point where workers are working as long or even longer than they did two centuries ago?
Today, workers are renewing calls for a shorter workday. A couple of months ago, home care workers in New York went on a six-day hunger strike to call for an end to their grueling 24-hour workday. Railroad, tech, and health workers across the country are calling attention to increased workloads and long workdays that have destroyed their lives and health. A California lawmaker is introducing legislation giving workers the right to disconnect from work after hours, without being on call for emails and texts. And the United Auto Workers has vowed to fight for a four-day, 32-hour workweek, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has taken up this fight in Congress.
This restoration of the May Day movement raises a different question: In a country where the labor movement was born from the struggle for a shorter workday, how did we get to the point where workers are working as long or even longer than they did two centuries ago?
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, LAI YEE CHAN HAD LABORED in New York City’s garment factories, sometimes leaving work at 2 a.m. But the long hours paled in comparison to the five-days-a-week, 24-hour shifts she worked as a home attendant. Chan told us that for seven years, she cooked, bathed, clothed, and cleaned for an elderly man with Alzheimer’s who had been partially paralyzed by a stroke. At night, while he slept, she had to remain alert to tend to his potential needs.
“The 24 hours we work is a slow death,” Chan said.
The World Health Organization affirms what Chan said, attributing 5 percent of deaths to heart disease and stroke caused by regularly working over 55 hours a week.
During this time, Chan didn’t get to spend time with her family, watch her kids grow, or have dinner with them.
“I spent my life in someone else’s home,” she said.
She developed body aches and nerve damage; the health of her co-workers often deteriorated so quickly that they needed their own home attendant upon retirement.
These conditions are hardly isolated to immigrant workers in the home care industry.
A visual effects worker with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) told Labor Notes he had worked as many as 20 hours a day, 100 hours per week, with no lunch breaks on a Netflix production.
“You don’t have time to cook food, see anyone else outside of work, or even have a social life,” he said.
Tech and other work-from-home professionals who are on call 24 hours per day are now suffering the same fate. Emails, texts, and the ever-present Slack channel constantly make demands on workers who at first welcomed the additional flexibility of working from home. During the pandemic, hybrid schedules cut back commute time and allowed parents to juggle child care. But the price of that flexibility has been giving up any boundary between work and home. Nights, weekends, meals, and leisure time are all interrupted by “quick” reminders, callbacks, and check-ins.
Workers at the country’s largest freight rail company, BNSF Railway, have spent most of their careers almost always on call 24 hours a day before they are called into work when the company deems there is enough cargo to make it profitable—a system called “precision scheduled railroading.” If they take one day off for a holiday or medical visit, they are penalized and must work 14 continuous days to earn back “points.” Vice reporter Aaron Gordon spoke to 28 BNSF Railway workers who said the constant sleep deprivation made them nod off at work; miss funerals, holidays, and birthdays; forgo doctor’s visits; and parent through FaceTime or Zoom.
“By the end of my 10 years, it didn’t matter how much money they threw at me,” a BNSF Railway worker told Vice. “That job changed me. I didn’t feel as if I was even a person anymore. I’d lost my hobbies, my friends, and my fiancée. More importantly I’d lost any reason to live.”
Astoundingly, nearly all the aforementioned workers belong to a union.
The Chinese-American Planning Council owed Chan $247,000 for six years of 24-hour workdays. When Chan received only $200 for the 6,000 hours of overtime she worked during a four-year period, 1199SEIU refused to advocate for their member. She said the union went as far as to tell her that her employer was not required to pay overtime because it is a nonprofit organization. The union has undermined workers’ efforts to end the 24-hour workday or recover stolen wages.
In 2019, 1199SEIU calculated that its 42 home care agencies owed over $6 billion in wages, stemming from illegally paying workers for only 13 hours of each 24-hour shift. The union stopped its members from fighting for their stolen wages in court, forcing them to accept an arbitration settlement in which each worker received an average of $250, only half a percent of what the union estimated was stolen. This is less than two days of back pay for 24-hour shifts, even though the settlement was supposed to redress eight years of grueling shifts that have inflicted permanent mental and physical damage.
Despite the billions of dollars health insurance companies and home care agencies have stolen, 1199SEIU wanted to kill a New York City bill that would end the 24-hour workday. Instead, they are pushing for a $3-per-hour minimum-wage increase, which is helpful but does not solve the problems caused by long workdays.
Rona Shapiro, the executive vice president of 1199SEIU, who oversees home care workers organizing, did not respond to our phone call requesting comment.
Because of the lack of statutory limits to the workday, employers can still force workers to work overtime.
In December 2022, President Joe Biden blocked a national U.S. railroad strike and forced unions to agree to a 24 percent wage increase. Most union railway workers, including those at BNSF, are now covered by paid sick leave, a sticking point left out of Biden’s agreement. But this does not fully address workers’ concerns over on-call schedules that dictate the bulk of their lives.
Dissatisfied with years of concessions by IATSE leadership—including its 2021 agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which swept aside demands to reduce work hours—some members created a reform caucus called CREW, demanding a 40-hour workweek and other work-life balance measures.
“The 2021 contracts kind of broke a lot of people’s hearts, like me, who wanted to see IATSE be a fighting union,” Greg Loebell, a lighting programmer and technician member of CREW, told the Prospect. Loebell regularly works 12-hour days. He noted that even though less than half of IATSE’s membership voted for the 2021 agreement, its Electoral College–like system allowed the agreement to be approved.
IATSE’s communications director Jonas Loeb has not responded to our email and voicemail, requesting a response to the problems raised by CREW members.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain reinvigorated the labor movement’s fight for a shorter workday when he made a 32-hour workweek part of contract demands. Even though the provision did not make it into the final agreement, Fain told In These Times that he’s not giving up.
“I really felt it was imperative to get the dialogue going again, to try to fight for a shorter workweek and get the public thinking along those lines,” Fain said.
EIGHT-HOUR LEAGUES STARTED DURING THE CIVIL WAR. The movement for a shorter workday unified workers across different sectors, building the foundation for the first national labor organization, the National Labor Union. Trade union membership skyrocketed around the demand for control over the workday; when the Knights of Labor snubbed calls to strike for the eight-hour workday, its membership started declining. It was amid this movement that the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was formed in December 1886.
But in the years that followed, AFL leadership increasingly distanced itself from the movement—until the federation withdrew from the eight-hour campaign altogether in 1900, prompting individual unions and rank-and-file members to fight through militant action on their own. In 1916, the Chicago chapter of the AFL pushed the national leadership to support a national steel strike around the eight-hour workday, but when the AFL leadership failed to carry out plans for a national campaign, the 24 unions involved failed to unify, and the strike was broken.
In 1937, the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) won a historic agreement with U.S. Steel for an eight-hour day and 40-hour workweek. But despite the gains, by 1938—when the AFL subsumed the CIO and worked together with FDR’s New Deal administration to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act—the legislation had taken the teeth out of workers’ demand to shorten and control their workday. It established a standard 40-hour workweek with overtime pay for hourly wage earners, but there were no statutory protections for workers to guarantee a 40-hour workweek, to refuse mandatory overtime, or to restrict work speedups and work overload. Worker demands to control their time were effectively swept aside, with a little more money put in its place.
Because of the lack of statutory limits to the workday, employers can still force workers to work overtime under threat of firing or other disciplinary measures.
Sen. Sanders’s Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act has been welcomed by many. But by not including a right to say no to longer hours, the act will unwittingly repeat the same mistakes of the FLSA. It’s why employers can still force workers to work a 24-hour workday in a country that has long established a standard 40-hour workweek. Workers will not have control over their time without statutory limits to the workday.
BEFORE LAI YEE CHAN STARTED WORKING 24-HOUR SHIFTS, she had to piece together four- or five-hour shifts to make a living. Many workers reason that working longer hours will bring in more pay, and result in a better life. It’s a false logic that workers now see through, particularly since the pandemic and the growing questioning of whether people “live to work or work to live.”
Working 24 hours a day for five days a week, Chan was robbed of 11 hours of work per day and only paid for 13. Even if she was paid the minimum amount for all those hours, earning $13 an hour as a home attendant, she would have reached her basic living costs of an estimated $500 a week after working around 38 hours. But working 120 hours a week meant that even more of her time—82 hours—went unpaid. That is how employers squeeze profits from their workers—by wringing longer, and essentially unpaid, hours from their workday.
Employers have raised wages, however grudgingly, rather than place a limit on working hours. That’s one of the reasons why wealth inequality in the U.S. outpaces that of other rich nations—because the profit from long hours far outweighs that which comes from wage increases. It also robs workers of their health, their time with their families, and their ability to engage in civic and social life.
It’s no surprise that overwork also exists alongside underwork, with growing ranks of gig workers who labor as independent contractors, piecing together multiple jobs with no benefits or workplace protections. That’s why some economists have long argued that shortening work hours would lead to more stable jobs and less unemployment for the workforce. And it would give back a precious commodity to workers: their time.
