The bloody history of the 40-hour work week — and why it's under threat again

From Haymarket to the gig economy, the forty-hour work week was never just a given

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The 40-hour work week is a background fact of modern life — a given, embedded in our consciousness somewhere between indoor plumbing and ubiquitous Wi-Fi. Children grow up assuming that work weeks have always ended and that weekends have always been a thing, much like seasonal changes have always been a thing.

But the history runs counter to such assumptions. In fact, the 40-hour work week was the product of generations of struggle, with more than 100 years of strikes, riots, court fights, and funerals all apparently necessary to establish what we now take for granted. You can even put a relatively precise body count to it — one that climbs into the hundreds when you add up the strikers shot by police and soldiers, the organizers hanged, the miners killed in collapses tied to literally murderous schedules.

This long, bloody history looms all the more significant now, in an age in which worker protections — up to and including the 40-hour work week — are being methodically trimmed back and chipped away, while the internet itself helps blur what remains of the boundaries between life and work. If the old enemies were the factory owner and the court injunction, the new ones include algorithms that never sleep, and an economy that pressures knowledge workers and creators to produce content, with the clock never switching........

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