For the most part, today’s workers sit at desks or on couches plugging away at laptops - which isn’t exactly an illustration of a manual, labor-intensive gig. It’s even changed incredibly over the last decade. Work has changed incredibly over the last century. Should today’s businesses really look to a law designed to help companies of yore for guidance? But due to a combination of technology, globalization, and outsourcing, many manufacturing and industrial jobs that the laws were created for either don’t exist anymore or at least don’t exist in the United States.

Work Has Changedīy and large, the eight-hour work day was created to protect workers who held jobs brought about by the industrial revolution. In that light, the eight-hour work day makes sense. Even if they were able to notch 60-hour workweeks, it was only a matter of time before their bodies would break down physically. Ask anyone who’s ever worked manual labor, and they’ll tell you the same thing: it’s grueling. Because their jobs consisted primarily of manual labor, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that labor unions, advocates, and politicians lobbied hard to limit workers’ hours. Prior to the 8-hour work day, many Americans - who worked primarily in manufacturing and industrial capacities - would routinely clock 10- or even 12-hour days. But it wasn’t until more than 70 years after the Illinois law that all full-time workers in the United States were required to be paid overtime if they worked more than 40 hours a week, thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

Because of Ford’s stature, the move stimulated a national discussion. In 1926, as many history scholars know, Henry Ford - possibly influenced by US labor unions - instituted an eight-hour work day for some of his employees. Here’s a summary: The first law in the United States that called for an eight-hour work day was passed in Illinois in 1867. This PolitiFact article serves as a nice primer. Where did the concept of the 9-to-5 job come from?

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