Calculate the time period you have worked at a particular job from the record of the job history you have created, 12 months for each full year and adding the months of partial years from the beginning and the end of your tenure to the total. Bill Brown has been a freelance writer for more than 14 years. Focusing on trade journals covering construction and home topics, his work appears in online and print publications.
Brown holds a Master of Arts in liberal arts from St. John's University and is currently based in Houston. Share It. Changes in the organization of work, with the continued rise of merchant capitalists, the transition from the artisanal shop to the early factory, and an intensified work pace had become widespread by about These changes produced the first extensive, aggressive movement among workers for shorter hours, as the ten-hour movement blossomed in New York City, Philadelphia and Boston.
Rallying around the ten-hour banner, workers formed the first city-central labor union in the U. Although the length of the workday is largely an economic decision arrived at by the interaction of the supply and demand for labor, advocates of shorter hours and foes of shorter hours have often argued the issue on moral grounds.
Detractors countered that workers would abuse leisure time especially in saloons and that long, dedicated hours of work were the path to success, which should not be blocked for the great number of ambitious workers. When Samuel Slater built the first textile mills in the U. These hours? During the s, an increased work pace, tighter supervision, and the addition of about fifteen minutes to the work day partly due to the introduction of artificial lighting during winter months , plus the growth of a core of more permanent industrial workers, fueled a campaign for a shorter workweek among mill workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, whose workweek averaged about 74 hours.
This agitation was led by Sarah Bagley and the New England Female Labor Reform Association, which, beginning in , petitioned the state legislature to intervene in the determination of hours.
However, these laws also specified that a contract freely entered into by employee and employer could set any length for the workweek. Hence, these laws had little impact. Legislation passed by the federal government had a more direct, though limited effect. On March 31, , President Martin Van Buren issued an executive order mandating a ten-hour day for all federal employees engaged in manual work. As the length of the workweek gradually declined, political agitation for shorter hours seems to have waned for the next two decades.
However, immediately after the Civil War reductions in the length of the workweek reemerged as an important issue for organized labor. The new goal was an eight -hour day. The leading proponent of this idea, Ira Steward, argued that decreasing the length of the workweek would raise the standard of living of workers by raising their desired consumption levels as their leisure expanded, and by ending unemployment. The hub of the newly launched movement was Boston and Grand Eight Hours Leagues sprang up around the country in and The leaders of the movement called the meeting of the first national organization to unite workers of different trades, the National Labor Union, which met in Baltimore in The passage of the state laws did foment action by workers — especially in Chicago where parades, a general strike, rioting and martial law ensued.
In only a few places did work hours fall after the passage of these laws. Many become disillusioned with the idea of using the government to promote shorter hours and by the late s, efforts to push for a universal eight-hour day had been put on the back burner.
It covered only female workers and became fully effective by This legislation was fairly late by European standards. Britain had passed its first effective Factory Act, setting maximum hours for almost half of its very young textile workers, in In the early s organized labor in the U.
Meanwhile, the Knights of Labor, which had begun as a secret fraternal society and evolved a labor union, began to gain strength. It appears that many nonunionized workers, especially the unskilled, came to see in the Knights a chance to obtain a better deal from their employers, perhaps even to obtain the eight-hour day.
The Knights mushroomed and its new membership demanded that their local leaders support them in attaining the eight-hour day. Powderly reasoned that low incomes forced workmen to accept long hours. Nelson points to divisions among workers, which probably had much to do with the failure in of the drive for the eight-hour day. Lack of will and organization among workers was undoubtedly important, but its collapse was aided by violence that marred strikes and political rallies in Chicago and Milwaukee.
The public backlash and fear of revolution damned the eight-hour organizers along with the radicals and dampened the drive toward eight hours — although it is estimated that the strikes of May shortened the workweek for about , industrial workers, especially in New York City and Cincinnati.
It held shorter hours as a high priority. In the aftermath of , the American Federation of Labor adopted a new strategy of selecting each year one industry in which it would attempt to win the eight-hour day, after laying solid plans, organizing, and building up a strike fund war chest by taxing nonstriking unions.
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners was selected first and May 1, was set as a day of national strikes. It is estimated that nearly , workers gained the eight-hour day as a result of these strikes in Instead, the length of the workweek continued to erode during this period, sometimes as the result of a successful local strike, more often as the result of broader economic forces.
By , 26 percent of states had maximum hours laws covering women, children and, in some, adult men generally only those in hazardous industries. The percentage of states with maximum hours laws climbed to 58 percent in , 76 percent in , and 84 percent in Steinberg calculates that the percent of employees covered climbed from 4 percent nationally in , to 7 percent in , and 12 percent in and In addition, these laws became more restrictive with the average legal standard falling from a maximum of According to her calculations, in about 16 percent of the workers covered by these laws were adult men, 49 percent were adult women and the rest were minors.
The banner years for maximum hours legislation were right around Oregon case In the Court upheld a maximum eight-hour day for workmen in the hazardous industries of mining and smelting in Utah in Holden vs. In Lochner vs. The defendant showed that mortality rates in baking were only slightly above average, and lower than those for many unregulated occupations, arguing that this was special interest legislation, designed to favor unionized bakers.
Several state courts, on the other hand, supported laws regulating the hours of men in only marginally hazardous work. By , in Bunting vs. Oregon, the Supreme Court seemingly overturned the logic of the Lochner decision, supporting a state law that required overtime payment for all men working long hours.
The general presumption during this period was that the courts would allow regulation of labor concerning women and children, who were thought to be incapable of bargaining on an equal footing with employers and in special need of protection. Men were allowed freedom of contract unless it could be proven that regulating their hours served a higher good for the population at large. A new cadre of social scientists began to offer evidence that long hours produced health-threatening, productivity-reducing fatigue.
In addition, data relating to hours and output among British and American war workers during World War I helped convince some that long hours could be counterproductive. Businessmen, however, frequently attacked the shorter hours movement as merely a ploy to raise wages, since workers were generally willing to work overtime at higher wage rates.
The law set eight hours as the basic workday and required higher overtime pay for longer hours. Labor markets became very tight during World War I as the demand for workers soared and the unemployment rate plunged. These forces put workers in a strong bargaining position, which they used to obtain shorter work schedules.
The move to shorter hours was also pushed by the federal government, which gave unprecedented support to unionization. At the end of the war everyone wondered if organized labor would maintain its newfound power and the crucial test case was the steel industry.
Blast furnace workers generally put in hour workweeks. These abnormally long hours were the subject of much denunciation and a major issue in a strike that began in September The move came after much arm-twisting by President Harding but its timing may be explained by immigration restrictions and the loss of immigrant workers who were willing to accept such long hours Shiells, During the s agitation for shorter workdays largely disappeared, now that the workweek had fallen to about 50 hours.
However, pressure arose to grant half-holidays on Saturday or Saturday off — especially in industries whose workers were predominantly Jewish. By at least large establishments had adopted the five-day week, while only 32 had it by Even the reformist American Labor Legislation Review greeted the call for a five-day workweek with lukewarm interest.
Hunnicutt argues that during the s businessmen and economists began to see shorter hours as a threat to future economic growth. It replaced the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy and business began to persuade workers that more work brought more tangible rewards.
Many workers began to oppose further decreases in the length of the workweek. Hunnicutt concludes that a new work ethic arose as Americans threw off the psychology of scarcity for one of abundance. Then the Great Depression hit the American economy. By about half of American employers had shortened hours.
Amid these developments, the AFL called for a federally-mandated thirty-hour workweek. The bill was sponsored in the House by William Connery. Roosevelt originally supported the Black-Connery proposals, but soon backed off, uneasy with a provision forbidding importation of goods produced by workers whose weeks were longer than thirty hours, and convinced by arguments of business that trying to legislate fewer hours might have disastrous results.
Hunnicutt argues that an implicit deal was struck in the NIRA. Business, with the threat of thirty hours hanging over its head, fell raggedly into line.
Despite a plan by NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson to make blanket provisions for a thirty-five hour workweek in all industry codes, by late August , the momentum toward the thirty-hour week had dissipated. About half of employees covered by NRA codes had their hours set at forty per week and nearly 40 percent had workweeks longer than forty hours. Hunnicutt argues that the entire New Deal can be seen as an attempt to keep shorter-hours advocates at bay.
After the Supreme Court struck down the NRA, Roosevelt responded to continued demands for thirty hours with the Works Progress Administration, the Wagner Act, Social Security, and, finally, the Fair Labor Standards Acts, which set a federal minimum wage and decreed that overtime beyond forty hours per week would be paid at one-and-a-half times the base rate in covered industries.
As the Great Depression ended, average weekly work hours slowly climbed from their low reached in With the postwar return of weekly work hours to the forty-hour level the shorter hours movement effectively ended.
Offsetting isolated examples of hours reductions after World War II, there were noteworthy cases of backsliding. Then divide that figure by the number of weeks in the reference period which is normally 17 weeks. You have a standard working week of 40 hours eight hours a day. You also do 12 hours overtime a week for the first 10 weeks of your week reference period.
So you would have worked an average of This would be within the working time limits. You will need to make up time in your calculation if you are away during the reference period because you are taking:.
You do this by extending the reference period by the same number of days as you were away. You also look at the hours you worked on the days which were immediately before the week period. You then do overtime of eight hours a week for the first 12 weeks of your week reference period. You also take four days annual leave and work one normal day eight hours that week.
When you return to work, you only do your normal hours with no overtime for one week. This means you would have worked an average of If you work shifts, you will need to use the following formula to work out your average working time. You are a night worker and you normally work four hour shifts each week. The total number of normal hours of work for a week reference period is:. This means that you would work an average of 48 hours a week, which is within the working times limits.
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