Our current 8-hour work day was the brainchild of Robert Owen, a Welsh manufacturer and labor rights organizer who, in 1817, came up with the idea of dividing the day into three equal parts, “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” In this petition from the Essex Company records, workers ask for a reduction in their day to 10 hours. Unions would push for shorter working days throughout the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It was not until 1938, 121 years after Owen, that the 40-hour week became the norm in most industries.
On loan from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives
