Naturalist's Almanac

Labor Day occurs every year on the first Monday in September. It's a good time to think about the natural history of work. Having recently retired, I am exploring what work means, and I find myself wondering where something as fixed and unnatural as the standard 8-hour, 5-day, 40-hour work week came from.

For primitive hunters and gatherers, there's really no such thing as "work" that's separate from the rest of life. Men, women, and children do what they need to do to survive, and they do it when it needs to be done. Day, night, and the seasons — not the time clock and calendar — govern everyone's activities.

With agriculture came change. Subsistence agriculture still involved working as long and as hard as necessary to survive, but larger scale agriculture began to dictate new ways of doing things: work now became something that workers had to do for someone else, not just themselves, their family, or their tribe.

Individuals no longer owned what they produced, and everyone became dependent on others for the various things they needed. Workers had to stay on their assigned jobs from sunrise to sunset, performing tasks that were only indirectly connected to their personal survival.

The industrial revolution introduced yet new complexities. Sunrise to sunset was too long to expect people to work indoors at tasks that were now totally disconnected from personal survival. Factory workers became unhappy and began to push for shorter hours.

First they asked for a limit of 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. During the 1800s, they asked for 10 hours, 6 days a week. Labor Day was introduced in 1882, when most Americans were still working 60 hours a week and only dreaming of a 48-hour week, which didn't become the norm until World War I.

It wasn't until 1938 that the Fair Labor Standards Act started the final countdown: 44 hours in 1938, 42 hours in 1939, and 40 hours in 1940. So the 8-hour, 5-day, 40-hour work week has only been with us for about as long as an early retiree like myself has been alive.

Certainly I can unlearn a concept that has been around for such a brief period. I'd like to spend at least the early stages of my retirement exploring how work, once detached from clock and calendar time, might once again be more directly connected to survival — in a much altered world.

MORE INFORMATION

U.S. Department of Labor
http://www.dol.gov/opa/aboutdol/laborday.htm

This is the Department of Labor’s History of Labor Day. It tells us that the first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882 in New York City. In 1884, the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, and by 1885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers. Finally, in 1894, Congress passed the legislation that made it a legal holiday everywhere.

PBS News Hour Special
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/labor_day_9-2.html

This PBS Online News Hour special offers an interesting introduction to Labor Day, focusing on the Pullman (railroad sleeping car) strike in Illinois that led to the legislation that made Labor Day a legal holiday. It includes links to other News Hour materials related to labor.

USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/history/labor-day-hurricanes.htm

Elsewhere among USA Today’s hurricane materials is this discussion of hurricanes that have hit during the Labor Day weekend since 1935. They list six hurricanes, with links to more information about some of them.