Eight-hour day is gone but not forgotten
By Bill Knight | 11th March 2008
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, but one of its key provisions is increasingly ignored, hurting working Americans and U.S. society.
The last major piece of New Deal legislation, that law guaranteed a minimum wage, banned child labor, set the maximum work week at 40 hours, and made the 8-hour day standard. But that standard has virtually vanished in an economy that values corporate profit over individual well-being, and that requires households that want to keep up with rising prices to work multiple jobs or as many hours as possible – or as ordered.
Neither organized labor nor the political parties are helping enough, although there’s a little promise in the Presidential campaign. U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) supported 24 of 26 proposals advocated by Take Care Net, a nonprofit group that surveyed all Presidential candidates. U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) backed 21 of 26.
No Republican responded to the survey, which asked about initiatives such as limiting mandatory overtime and indexing the minimum wage to productivity or inflation.
The 8-hour movement has deep roots in Illinois, where it first was a demand during the Civil War. The state legislature in 1867 passed an 8-hour day law, but it had a huge loophole letting employers “contract” with workers to work longer days — foreshadowing future laws with other loopholes.
By the late 19th century, the 8-hour day was a key issue of America’s growing labor movement, centered somewhat in Chicago. Almost six decades of organizing, agitating and lobbying culminated in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It finally legalized the notion expressed in labor’s rally cry, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
The FLSA was supposed to work through an indirect financial penalty on employers who made people work overtime: “time-and-a-half” pay. That was not meant to enrich those who worked a lot of hours as much as encourage employers to hire more people to meet their needs.
Today, of course, one of modern civilization’s greatest achievements – earned leisure – is almost gone. In fact, U.S. workers spend more time on the job than workers in any developed country because they’re exempted or compelled to worker longer days and weeks and months and years.
The FLSA didn’t cover farm workers, domestic workers, employees and management. So many companies now call some workers assistant managers and escape their legal obligations, pay time-and-a-half because it’s cheaper than hiring full-time employees, improperly demand overtime as a condition of employment, require overtime for sometimes-elusive “compensatory” time off, create high-falutin’ schemes like “flex time” or “alternative schedules” that compress weeks into days of 10 or 12 hours, or just play to the increasing dependence workers have for any extra income they can earn to pay rising costs for utilities, gasoline, housing and consumer goods.
Take Back Your Time Day — an initiative of the Simplicity Forum, part of the Simplicity Movement promoting “simple, just and sustainable ways of life” — is a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. TBYTD studied the American workplace and found that:
* Millions of Americans are overworked, over-scheduled and stressed out.
* We put in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s — despite promises of a coming Age of Leisure by the year 2000.
* Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of an economic downturn.
* Americans work an average of almost nine full weeks (350 hours) longer a year than Europeans do.
There are obvious and well-documented increase in likelihood of accidents or injuries that can result from longer hours and worker fatigue, which is why there are regulations limiting work days for jobs like pilots, train crews, air-traffic controllers, and truckers. (That said, the American Trucking Association last year got the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the courts to relax rules for long-haul truckers, so companies can make truckers spend 11 hours a day driving 35-Ton rigs instead of the previous cap of 10-hour days.)
Time stress hurts all of us in other, different ways, the TBYTD says.
* Time stress threatens health, cutting time for exercise and encouraging consumption of calorie-laden fast foods. Job stress and burnout costs the U.S. economy more than $300 billion a year.
* Time stress threatens marriages, families and relationships as there’s less time for others, to care for children and elders, or to just relax.
* It weakens communities. There’s less time to know neighbors, supervise youngsters and volunteer.
* It reduces employment since fewer people are hired.
* It even contributes to the destruction of our environment. Studies show that lack of time encourages use of convenience and throwaway items and reduces recycling.
If Big Business can’t control itself, citizens must pressure employers to abide by the 8-hour day or lobby elected officials to curb mandatory overtime.
Employers can “rent” workers for 8 hours; we need 8 hours to rest; and we need 8 hours for our families, communities, world and future.
(For more information or TBYTD’s most recent newsletter, go online to www.timeday.org/)
(Take Care Net’s Presidential Work Family survey is posted at http://www.takecarenet.org/)
Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.