Happy Labor Day!

Honoring the Fight for an 8-Hour Workday

Most of us associate Labor Day with BBQs, parades, and weekend camping trips. But the more we learn about the holiday, the more we realize that it is really a celebration of things we take for granted yet could not imagine living without. It is a commemoration of the men and women who risked their lives, liberty, and reputations to secure them for us.

For instance, take the eight-hour workday, the current standard in the United States.1 

Everyone has different careers and work schedules. Some are incredibly demanding and long. Others are on swing shifts. But for many Americans, the day looks like this: get up, eat breakfast, and see children off to school. Go to work, break for lunch, work through the afternoon, and then head home in time for dinner. It’s a simple thing, this schedule. But it’s a schedule that enables us to keep our bodies fueled, hydrated, and rested. A schedule that allows for time to attend our loved ones’ school plays and soccer games. A schedule that affords more time for recreation, relaxation, and self-improvement.

But it wasn’t always this way.

The year: 1835. The location: Philadelphia. Throughout the enormous city – actually, throughout the entire country – workers knew only one sort of workday.

They called it “sun to sun.”

As the sun crested over the horizon each day, tens of thousands of laborers were already at work. Shoveling coal. Laying bricks. Painting houses, driving carts, unloading boats, and a hundred other tasks. They would work, often under hazardous conditions and for little pay until the sun finally went down. During the summer, this could mean up to 15 hours per day, leaving them no opportunity to see their families or do much of anything besides work. The winter workday, in contrast, was comparatively short – at around 9 hours per day – but it also meant an enormous drop in pay or routine unemployment. Neither situation was acceptable for someone trying to feed their family. To make matters worse, the toil of a sun-to-sun day led to a laundry list of physical ailments. Workers routinely suffered “swollen ankles, nervous headaches, lung disease, stomach problems,” and much, much more.

Then, one day, a letter arrived from Boston. The city that helped launch the American Revolution was requesting help from the city that had declared American Independence. Laborers there – primarily carpenters, but soon masons and stonecutters, as well – were done with this unfair system. They were demanding their rights as workers, citizens, and human beings for something better.

We have been too long subjected to the odious, cruel, unjust, and tyrannical system which compels the operative mechanic to exhaust his physical and mental powers. We have rights and duties to perform as American citizens and members of our society, which forbid us to dispose of more than ten hours for a day’s work.2

Boston workers were calling for a citywide guarantee of a 10-hour workday regardless of the season. And they were asking laborers in other cities to call for the same thing.

The letter quickly gained traction in Philadelphia, circulating from worker to worker with astonishing speed. In modern verbiage, it went viral. For them, the demands in the letter were not just about having more time away from work. The demands were about ensuring the means to become better citizens and more productive members of society. As the letter from Boston had proclaimed – and as the Philadelphia workers then repeated –

“We have taken a firm and decided to stand to obtain the acknowledgment of those rights to enable us to perform our duties to God, our country, and ourselves.”3 

In May 1835, three hundred coal workers decided to go on strike. Together, they marched on the coal wharves and announced that no coal would be unloaded until a 10-hour workday was established.

This was not an easy decision. For any worker to go on strike was to risk not just their current job, but their entire future. Livelihoods and reputations could be ruined forever if the strike was not successful – and up to that point in American history, few strikes had been. In many cases, strikes could lead to injuries and even death. Nevertheless, the coal workers were quickly joined by almost every other laborer and tradesman in the city. The words in the Boston letter became a topic of discussion in every tavern and meeting house. Altogether, over twenty thousand workers began marching around the city, carrying banners that said, “From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.”

The movement was so organized, united, and swift that within three weeks, the old sun-to-sun system was out. The ten-hour day became standard throughout the city. In addition, many workers also gained an increase in their wages. But the movement didn’t stop there. The news quickly spread to every corner of the country. By the end of the year, workers from New England to the Carolinas had conquered the old system that “left no time for mental cultivation and kept people ignorant by keeping them always at work.”3 A system that was “destructive of social happiness and degrading to the name of freemen.” 3 In its place was a new system. One that had “broken [people’s] shackles, loosened their chains, and made them free from the galling yoke of excessive labor.” 3 

The rights won in 1835 laid the foundation for the rights we enjoy today: an eight-hour workday. The right to take vacations or medical leave. To care for our bodies properly. To see our families. To learn, live, and worship however we see fit. Rights we cannot live without…and which were secured for us by people who simply wanted a better future for themselves and their children.

And that, to us, is what this holiday is all about. I wish you a happy Labor Day!

1 “Average hours employed people spent working,” United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/emp-by-ftpt-job-edu-h.htm

2 “1835 Philadelphia General Strike,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_strike

3 “The Working People of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the General Strike of 1835,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, https://journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/view/30723