05/07/2026
F’n Right!!!
The 40-Hour Work Week Timeline
1817: Welsh manufacturer and labor rights activist Robert Owen coined the phrase ‘Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’, which became the first step towards a labour reform.
1835: Workers in Philadelphia organized the first general strike in North America, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.
1867: The Chicago labour movement called for the Illinois Legislature to limit workdays to eight hours, according to the Chicago Historical Society. The law was passed but allowed employers to contract with their workers for longer hours. To eliminate this option, Chicago workers went on a strike for an 8-hour day on May 1, 1867.
1868, June 24: The US Congress passed the first eight-hour-day work law for federal employees, which established an eight-hour workday for laborers and mechanics employed by the Federal Government and cut their wages by 20%.
1869: President Ulysses S. Grant issued a National Eight-Hour Law Proclamation declaring that the Government couldn’t reduce wages as a result of the reduction of the workday.
1870s: Private-sector workers pushed for the same rights: they wanted an eight-hour working day without a wage cut.
1884: The US Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.” The same year, Tom Mann formed the Eight Hour League in the UK to pressure the Trades Union Congress to adopt the eight-hour day.
1886, May 1: 350,000 workers nationwide struck and the National Labour Union (NLU), demanded Congress to pass a law mandating the eight-hour workday, which turned into a bombing of a peaceful labor demonstration on May 4, also known as the Haymarket affair. Later, May 1st was picked as International Workers’ Day (or Labour Day or May Day).
1898: The United Mine Workers won an eight-hour day.
1900: The Building Trades Council of San Francisco won an eight-hour day.
1905: The International Typographical Union won an eight-hour work day, and their strike paved the way for similar gains by the other printing unions. The majority of Americans still worked around 12-14 hours per day.
1912: In the 1912 Presidential Election, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party included eight-hour work days in their campaign.
1914: The Ford Motor Company cut shifts from nine to eight hours daily.
1916: The Adamson Act established an eight-hour working day, with additional overtime pay, for railroad workers.
1926: Henry Ford introduced 40-hour work weeks with five working days with no cut in wages after discovering that 48-hour work weeks yielded only a small increase in productivity that lasted a short period. This discovery inspired other manufacturing companies to adopt the 40-hour work week.
1937: After Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression (1929-1939), Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labour of his choice, proposed a forty-hour workweek as a part of the New Deal – a set of programs aimed to reform the US financial system.
1938: Congress passed the Fair Labour Standards Act, which required employers to pay overtime to all employees who worked more than 44 hours a week. This act was only applied to industries whose combined employment represented about 20% of the US labour force.
1940: The Fair Labour Standards Act was amended to reduce the workweek to 40 hours. Since then, the 40-hour work week has been a U.S. law.
1948: Australia achieved a 40-hour week.
1960s: Canada adopted the 40-hour work week.
1998: In the UK, Working Time Regulations introduced a limit of 40-hour work week for workers under 18 and 48 hours for workers over 18. An 8-hour limit to the working day has never been achieved in the UK. The average working week in the UK is now 42.5 hours.
