Dear Yahoo!:
How did 40 hours a week come to be known as "full time"?
Richard
Corte Madera, California
Dear Richard:
Workin' nine to five, what a way to make a livin' -- but before 1938, many Americans spent sunrise to sunset on the job, six days a week. And you thought your job was bad.
Workers agitated for a 10-hour day as early as the 1820s. Laws were passed reducing work hours for U.S. federal employees and for women workers in a couple states, but these were poorly enforced and mostly useless.
Estimates of hours worked in manufacturing from 1830 to 1890 show that a 60- to 70-hour workweek was the norm. In 1909, New York garment workers organized a massive strike to demand a 52-hour workweek. Many of the young women who sewed shirtwaists worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day. Only some of the workers got shorter hours. {Not much of a childhood working 84-100+ hours a week is it?}
Finally, after several tries in Congress and battles with the Supreme Court, President Franklin D. Roosevelt got the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938. While this law doesn't set the hours worked per week, it does require overtime pay if employees work more than 40 hours in one week. Of course, employers don't want to pay extra, so they tend to set the full-time week at 40 hours. Salaried workers aren't covered by this law, but it did turn the idea of a 40-hour workweek into the national standard.
