
“Any man demanding the forty hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country. ... The men of our country are becoming a race of softies and mollycoddles.” — Chairman of the board, Philadelphia Gear Works, 1926
Everyone reading this month’s column has grown up in an era in which the 5-day, 40-hour workweek was the standard of the land. It wasn’t always so.
At the country’s founding, when most Americans worked in agriculture, an 80-plus-hour week was common. By the early 1800s, with the coming of the Industrial Revolution, this was