Finally a day of rest — only 100 years late
Three-day weekends should have been the norm from the very beginning. Maybe society will finally recieve a day of rest – just a century later than it should have. Even God got a full day off.
In 1890, spurred by ongoing union strikes demanding better working conditions, the United States government started tracking the amount of hours Americans worked during a typical week. The average number for a manufacturing employee was a whopping 100 hours — when tracking building tradesmen, the number went up to 102.
Even when armed with numbers like that, it would take the country another 36 years and the rise of Henry Ford before the eight-hour workday became the gold standard of the American labor market.
Yet now, it feels a bit like we’re living in a pre-Ford wasteland of our own. Prepandemic, Americans worked more hours than any comparable nation — having the 6th most average annual hours worked per worker in 2018. Postpandemic, when millions of jobs went remote, the average American’s workday actually increased by about one hour. The ongoing result has been an unprecedented number of resignations, as many as 39 million in just 10 months. About 39% of the people who quit their job last year cite “working too many hours” as a primary driver for their departure.
Any student who works a part-time job or spins a few dozen extra plates knows that 48 hours is not nearly enough time to accomplish all that is abandoned for the sake of their degree: housework, groceries, meeting up with friends we’ve already canceled on three times, replacing tires, doctor’s appointments. When exactly is this ever-evasive “day of rest” people keep talking about?
Now that California is officially considering the four-day workweek, a certain amount of celebratory fervor is expected. For the first time in nearly 100 years, our labor laws might be shifting with the wellbeing of the employee in the foreground.
The bill would only apply to private-sector companies with more than 500 employees. It would function as a trial run of sorts, similar to ones played out in Belgium and Iceland, both of which yielded hopeful results: Productivity remained high and the mental and emotional well-being of participating employees skyrocketed.
All that being said, the bill is still unlikely to pass. Already labeled a “job killer” by the California Chamber of Commerce, economists and executives alike are extremely skeptical of the proposed 32-hour workweek. Some fear it will discourage pay raises, while others insist that shorter workweeks do not actually increase employment, thus extending the effects of The Great Resignation.
When Ford announced his company’s adoption of a five-day workweek in 1926, he wrote, “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the five-day workweek will open our way to still greater prosperity … It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.”
Nothing is the same as it was in 1926. There’s an eight-year-old somewhere using an iPad to play Wordle while lounging on a Purple Mattress bought with Honey’s 10% discount code. Refusing to update labor laws for fear of change is to deny that change has already taken place. People’s relationship to their workplace has shifted; whether companies choose to adapt is up to their own discretion and, possibly, detriment.
If the American worker’s tenacity is still being called into question, and our yearning for a day of relaxation scoffed at, it begs the question: If, after facing the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement, the threat of nuclear warfare, two devastating recessions, an ongoing climate crisis and global pandemic, we are still unqualified for a little rest and repose, at what point will we have sufficiently earned it?