One of the things I repeat to my students all the time is how people fought and died--literally--for the 8 hour day and 40 hour week for 75 years before it was enshrined in federal law. And then it was standard for maybe 60 years before employers reneged again.
It's fascinating to see the demand for shorter and more predictable hours--8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours for what we will--reassert itself as a major struggle at Nabisco, Kellogg's, Deere, New York Magazine, etc., etc.
One of the things workers are (re)learning now is that legal requirements for short hours won't cut it. The Fair Labor Standards Act was not the first law to limit working hours. Many others had been passed and ignored. What gets workers shorter hours is power--that is, a union.
I note also how the *reason* workers need shorter hours is the same now as it was in the second half of the 19th century: the need for rest, the need for recreation, the desire to have time to better themselves, the demand to have time to be full and free citizens.
There's a reason the short hour movement started just after Emancipation: it was part of a nationwide movement to define what it would be to be free workers. Freedom has to mean not just the ability to quit, but the ability to fully engage in free society.
And you can't engage in free society--in education, in politics, in family life, in leisure--if you only have time for work and sleep. We need 8 hours (at least!) for what we will.
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