Why Do We Work 40 Hours A Week? — Transcript

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1. 0:02oh hi i'm Mr.Beat. I'm busy at work as you can see
2. 0:08uh well i'm pretending to be working  at least yeah these are blank pages
3. 0:12Seriously though, I'm at work right now which is  why iIm wearing a button-up shirt even though I
4. 0:17hate wearing button-up shirts in addition  to being a youtube media sensation
5. 0:22I still teach high school social studies  as you probably already knew teaching is a
6. 0:26very demanding job my students have already left  for the day but i'm still here grading checking
7. 0:32emails and planning lessons for the next day In the United States, there’s a misconception
8. 0:38that teachers “have it easy” because they  “have the summers off.” But if you add up all
9. 0:44the hours an average American teacher works  each year, they still end up averaging more
10. 0:48than 42 hours a week, which is just about  what the average American works a week.
11. 0:53And that sounds about right, because  the 40-hour work week is pretty much the
12. 0:58standard for most American jobs today.
13. 1:01Now, as a teacher I get paid a salary,  meaning I’m not paid by the hour,
14. 1:07but paid on a regular basis the same amount no  matter the number of hours I work each day or
15. 1:11week. But did you know that most  Americans are hourly workers?
16. 1:15Yep, around 59% of Americans get paid by the  hour. Fortunately for them, thanks to the Fair
17. 1:21Labor Standards Act, they get overtime pay if  they work more than 40 hours in one week. For
18. 1:28each hour over 40 hours worked in a week, they get  one and one-half times their regular rates of pay.
19. 1:34Hold up hold up!
20. 1:36Why do we work 40 hours a week, or 8 hours  a day? Where the heck does that come from?
21. 1:41Well, throughout most of human history, the  work schedule was more fluid. Take the hunter
22. 1:46gatherers. Hunters hunted when they needed to  hunt. Gatherers gathered when they needed to...you
23. 1:53know...gather. And then once agriculture  became a big deal, farmers plowed their fields,
24. 1:58planted their seeds, harvested their crops,  and fed their animals, as needed. Even today,
25. 2:05it’s rather ridiculous to think of farmers  clocking in to work at 9:00 and clocking
26. 2:10out at 5. If anything, there are times of the  year where they are just constantly working.
27. 2:15And then came the First Industrial Revolution.
28. 2:18You know, that huuge transition in  world history where, for the first time,
29. 2:22fewer and fewer things were made by  hand and instead made by machines,
30. 2:26leading to bigger and bigger  factories to produce them?
31. 2:29The thing is, those machines helped, but factory  owners still greatly relied on the productivity
32. 2:35of their workers. Without their workers, they  would be screwed, as those expensive machines
33. 2:40would just be collecting dust. So factory owners  kept their factories open all day long and forced,
34. 2:47er...I mean, ASKED their workers to work as much  as possible. This led to the average factory
35. 2:53worker working 90 hours a week. Since the work  week was usually six days a week for most workers,
36. 2:5990 hours a week averages out to 15 hours A DAY.  Basically the workers would work and sleep. Work.
37. 3:06Sleep. Work. Sleep. Oh I guess  they had to eat somewhere in there.
38. 3:10What’s crazy is that the better the technology  got, the harder the workers had to work.
39. 3:16In the early days of the First Industrial  Revolution, workers had more leverage,
40. 3:21so it wasn’t as intense. However, when more and  more struggling farmers fled the countryside to
41. 3:27the cities to seek work in the early 1800s,  soon there were too many available workers,
42. 3:33and so factory owners now had the leverage.  And yeah, this is why they began to get away
43. 3:38with treating their workers like crap. Factory  conditions sucked. Often, factories were poorly
44. 3:44ventilated, so the air was dirty. They were  also poorly lit. Workers were on their feet
45. 3:49all day. And since the machines were often  very dangerous, all of this combined led to
46. 3:55many injuries on the job. Of course, back then,  if you got hurt on the job, you couldn’t work
47. 4:00any more so you just lost your job. And there  was no compensation...no medical insurance.
48. 4:06Not only that, but wages were  so low that sometimes women
49. 4:09and children also had to step in so that  families could make enough money to survive.
50. 4:14Children as young as FIVE  YEARS OLD worked in factories.
51. 4:20Needless to say, eventually  the workers began to unite
52. 4:23to demand better working conditions. After  all, the factory owners would be screwed if
53. 4:29ALL of them decided not to go into work.  And thus, the labor union was born.
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63. 5:26Ok….as far back as 1791, Philadelphia  carpenters went on strike, refusing to
64. 5:32go to work until they got a ten-hour  work day. The eight-hour work day,
65. 5:36however, had its origins in Great Britain.  Today, we can give a lot of credit to this dude:
66. 5:42Robert Owen. Owen was a wealthy industrialist, but  was also one of the supposed original socialists,
67. 5:49man. You know, before Karl Marx and Friedrich  Engels came around and made it trendy. Anyway,
68. 5:55in 1810, Owen also had proposed a ten-hour  work day for his own workers he managed in
69. 6:00a big textile mill. By 1817, Owen was  now all about the eight-hour work day,
70. 6:05coming up with the slogan “Eight hours’ labour,  eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.”
71. 6:11I mean, it sounds logical, doesn’t  it? Divide up the day into thirds.
72. 6:15A third work, a third play, a third  sleep. Too bad many adults today spend
73. 6:23that third of supposed play time  mostly working, eh? But I digress.
74. 6:28So the eight-hour work day started to  catch on, especially in Great Britain,
75. 6:33which passed a law (The Factory Act  of 1833) in 1833 that limited the work
76. 6:37for children in factories. Yep, those  aged 9-13 could only work 8 hours a day.
77. 6:44Geez. I guess there’s a lot more to this story.
78. 6:47Meanwhile, across the pond, workers were beginning  to organize and demanding reform. In 1835,
79. 6:54once again we return to Philadelphia  where they organized the first general
80. 6:59strike in North America, led by Irish coal  workers. Their banners said “From 6 to 6,
81. 7:06ten hours work and two hours for  meals.” Over the next few years,
82. 7:10various American labor movement publications  called specifically for an eight-hour work day.
83. 7:16In the 1840s and 1850s, certain workers  amazingly got the 8-hour work day
84. 7:21in New Zealand and Australia.  However, this was an anomaly.
85. 7:26In 1866, William Sylvis founded the National  Labor Union, and one of their first demands to
86. 7:33the United States Congress was to get them to pass  a law mandating an 8-hour work day. The law never
87. 7:39passed, but their efforts further popularized  the idea. On May 19, 1869, U.S. President
88. 7:46Ulysses Grant issued a proclamation calling  for an 8-hour work day for government workers.
89. 7:52It was during the Second Industrial Revolution  that the 8-hour work day really gained steam.
90. 7:59Get it, steam? That was bad, I know.
91. 8:03In the 1870s, new labor organizations like the  Knights of Labor and the Federation of Organized
92. 8:09Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and  Canada, made the 8-hour work day their main cause.
93. 8:151886 was a big year in labor rights history.  That year, the Illinois Legislature passed a law
94. 8:23mandating 8-hour work days. However,  many employers were like “nu-huh,
95. 8:29not gonna do it,” which led to huge worker strikes  throughout Chicago. On May 1, Albert Parsons,
96. 8:37who led the Chicago branch of the Knights of  Labor, and his wife Lucy Parsons, led a march
97. 8:42of 80,000 protesters down Michigan Avenue in  Chicago, in what today is known as the first
98. 8:48modern May Day Parade. They chanted “Eight-hour  day with no cut in pay.” This led to a huge
99. 8:56nationwide strike, of 350,000 workers at 1,200  factories. On May 3, things got tense when workers
100. 9:05on strike and those who were still trying to go  to work started to fight. The police arrived and
101. 9:10ended up killing four people. At another rally  the next day to protest this violence, a bomb
102. 9:16exploded at the Haymarket Square. In the hysteria,  police rounded up hundreds of labor activists,
103. 9:23including Albert Parsons, and charged them with  conspiracy to set off the bomb. To this day,
104. 9:29we don’t know who actually set off  that bomb, but Parsons was among those
105. 9:33executed for conspiracy. This all today  is simply known as the Haymarket Affair.
106. 9:38Many consider those executed in the Haymarket  Affair martyrs, as their cause became even
107. 9:44more widespread afterward. Over the next  few decades, more and more workers got
108. 9:49the 8-hour work day all around the world,  starting with mostly women and children.
109. 9:55Despite that, in 1890 full-time manufacturing
110. 9:58workers were now averaging  100 hours a week. Goodness.
111. 10:05It was the Progressive Era that finally made the  eight-hour workday not such a radical thing. It
112. 10:11didn’t happen all at once. There wasn’t  one single event that shifted everything
113. 10:15dramatically to it. It was incremental.  I will say, though, that Spain became the
114. 10:20very first country in the world to introduce  a law restricting the workday to a maximum
115. 10:25of eight hours for everyone doing  ANY kind of work on April 3, 1919.
116. 10:32Also, give some credit to Henry Ford, who  was a pretty shady character on other issues,
117. 10:37but with labor he was ahead  of the curve. On September 25,
118. 10:411926, Ford Motor Company officially  adopted a five-day, 40-hour workweek.
119. 10:47Wait a second, a FIVE day workweek? That’s  madness. So you’re telling me they got both
120. 10:52Sunday AND Saturday off?!? If I didn’t know any  better, I’d think that sounded like a weekend.
121. 11:00Yes, weekends weren’t really a thing until the  1920s and 1930s. Did your head just explode?
122. 11:07I mean, sure British workers had been talking  about the need to have two days off in a row as
123. 11:12early as the 1800s, but only in the  1920s and after so many workers and
124. 11:17laws started demanding it did companies  finally had to go along with it. In 1930,
125. 11:22the influential British economist John Maynard  Keynes even predicted that rising productivity
126. 11:29due to technology would shrink the  average workweek to just 15 hours.
127. 11:34Well obviously that didn’t happen, and here we  are 90 years later, still working our butts off.
128. 11:42According to some estimates, Americans are working  more now than they have in decades, by the way.
129. 11:48Since this school year began, I recently  estimated that I’ve been working between
130. 11:5265 to 70 hours a week when you  add it all up. But I’m lucky,
131. 11:59I love my jobs. All of them. And you’re  a big reason why. Thank you for watching.