In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organized a general strike, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals. Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.

In 1864, the eight-hour day quickly became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. The Illinois legislature passed a law in early 1867 granting an eight-hour day but had so many loopholes that it was largely ineffective. A city-wide strike that began on May 1, 1867 shut down the city’s economy for a week before collapsing. On June 25, 1868, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees[3] which was also of limited effectiveness. (On May 19, 1869, Grant signed a National Eight Hour Law Proclamation.[4])

In August 1866, the National Labor Union at Baltimore passed a resolution that said, “The first and great necessity of the present to free labour of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is achieved.”

During the 1870s, eight hours became a central demand, especially among labor organizers, with a network of Eight-Hour Leagues which held rallies and parades. A hundred thousand workers in New York City struck and won the eight-hour day in 1872, mostly for building trades workers. In Chicago, Albert Parsons became recording secretary of the Chicago Eight-Hour League in 1878, and was appointed a member of a national eight-hour committee in 1880.

At its convention in Chicago in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions resolved that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labour organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named.”

The leadership of the Knights of Labor, under Terence V. Powderly, rejected appeals to join the movement as a whole, but many local Knights assemblies joined the strike call including Chicago, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. On May 1, 1886, Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, with his wife Lucy Parsons and two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in what is regarded as the first modern May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour day. In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers who went on strike at 1,200 factories, including 70,000 in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, and additional thousands in other cities. Some workers gained shorter hours (eight or nine) with no reduction in pay; others accepted pay cuts with the reduction in hours.
Artist impression of the bomb explosion in Haymarket Square

On May 3, 1886, August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Newspaper), spoke at a meeting of 6,000 workers, and afterwards many of them moved down the street to harass strikebreakers at the McCormick plant in Chicago. The police arrived, opened fire, and killed four people, wounding many more. At a subsequent rally on May 4 to protest this violence, a bomb exploded at the Haymarket Square. Hundreds of labour activists were rounded up and the prominent labour leaders arrested, tried, convicted, and executed giving the movement its first martyrs. On June 26, 1893 Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld set the remaining leader free, and granted full pardons to all those tried claiming they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried and the hanged men had been the victims of “hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge”.

The American Federation of Labor, meeting in St Louis in December 1888, set May 1, 1890 as the day that American workers should work no more than eight hours. The International Workingmen’s Association (Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the date for international demonstrations, thus starting the international tradition of May Day.

The United Mine Workers won an eight-hour day in 1898.

The Building Trades Council (BTC) of San Francisco, under the leadership of P.H. McCarthy, won the eight-hour day in 1900 when the BTC unilaterally declared that its members would work only eight hours a day for $3 a day. When the mill resisted, the BTC began organizing mill workers; the employers responded by locking out 8,000 employees throughout the Bay Area. The BTC, in return, established a union planing mill from which construction employers could obtain supplies — or face boycotts and sympathy strikes if they did not. The mill owners went to arbitration, where the union won the eight-hour day, a closed shop for all skilled workers, and an arbitration panel to resolve future disputes. In return, the union agreed to refuse to work with material produced by non-union planing mills or those that paid less than the Bay Area employers.

By 1905, the eight-hour day was widely installed in the printing trades – see International Typographical Union (section) – but the vast majority of Americans worked 12-14 hour days.

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford’s productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.[5][6][7][8]

In the summer of 1915, amid increased labor demand for World War I, a series of strikes demanding the eight-hour day began in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They were so successful that they spread throughout the Northeast.[9]

The United States Adamson Act in 1916 established an eight-hour day, with additional pay for overtime, for railroad workers. This was the first federal law that regulated the hours of workers in private companies. The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Act in Wilson v. New, 243 U.S. 332 (1917).

The eight-hour day might have been realized for many working people in the U.S. in 1937, when what became the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter was first proposed under the New Deal. As enacted, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented about twenty percent of the U.S. labor force. In those industries, it set the maximum workweek at 44 hours,[10] but provided that employees working beyond 40 hours a week would receive additional overtime bonus salaries.[11]

I was President and CEO of 2 different companies(now retired) with Teamster’s employees. At each contract time I had to listen to their business agents spewing lies and exaggerations about the value and benefits of Unions and watched them try to justify their own existance at the expense of the company.

Years after I left, one of those companies was forced to close it’s doors because it couldn’t compete. It was a perfect example of your analogy of ‘Hilton vs. Motel 6′.

At my last job, I was able to get the Union out after 12 years of painstaking arguments regarding ‘the purpose of the unions vs. common sense’. Before the Union bowed out, I had a discussion with the Business Agent and he agreed that, by far, the best thing that management could do for its employees was to run a successful, and profitable business. To this day, those former teamsters are better off than ever before, especially in regard to health insurance and retirement benefits.

Thanks for the ‘Ammunition’ for future arguments with friends and family.

Stumbled on your blog. You are articulate, well researched and absolutely correct. Many have been fed so much nonsense that they cannot or will not understand the damage that unions do. I watched a company forced into bankruptcy by union demands — and the frightened helplessness of some very good workers as they watched the union leaders cause them all to be unemployed. In my experience, Unions are greedy entities who have outlived any usefulness as they do not operate for the good of Americans in general. Keep sharing the facts!!

Have you had a chance to read my minimum wage post above?

We live in a very non-free market country (if you are American). A major portion of the US economy is based on public funding. Commercial aviation, computers, the internet, lasers, shipping containers (a huge part of our economy). All developed at public expense. Today it’s nano technology among other things. This is a huge potential boon, and developed at public expense once again. The public pays the R&D, then hands the research off to private industry to reap the rewards. I happen to be an engineer that worked in defense for a long time. Now I’m out of that industry. But my salary is boosted by the huge government demand for engineers to develop defense related products. I benefit in a huge way from those non-free market forces, as does HP. I don’t see any tea partyers complaining about this.

But when that same government subsidizing process attempts to do something that might benefit the poor, everyone gets all committed to the free market. Tough love and rugged individualism for them. Massive corporate bail outs and public subsidy for us rich, well educated people.

If minimum wage laws produce real income gains and reduced employee turnover, why stop at $7 an hour? Why not raise the minimum wage to $10, maybe even $20 an hour?

Minimum wage increases may produce income gains for the people who already have jobs (if managers don’t compensate for the increase by cutting workers’ hours) but may also take away money that could’ve been used to hire additional workers. Such increases stifle opportunities for the unemployed, most of whom have little to no marketable skills, not much education beyond a high school diploma and little work experience to speak of. You think highly skilled, experienced workers make up the vast majority of the unemployed? It’s mostly people whose productivity barely justifies the $7 hourly pay the government forces businesses to pay.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a half-truth about WalMart, I’d own the company.

Unions fought and bled for an 8 hour day among other things. This was a long struggle, and a successful one. I don’t see you giving them any credit, which to me they clearly deserve. So does Ford. I will give him credit too. But without the union organization this wouldn’t have happened. It’s not something that would have reached Ford’s consciousness without the long union struggle.

I’ll look over your other links and respond later.

1. The minimum wage is historically low. What many economists believe is that a small raise in today’s minimum wage will have little to no impact on employment. But this is different than saying a meaningful raise in the minimum wage will have no impact.

For example, say that we have a minimum wage of $0.25/hour. Clearly, that minimum wage would be meaningless. Few would work at such a wage, except maybe those who are compensated by other factors (tips, for example - where its the “other factors” that matters more). So a raise from $0.25 to say $0.50, wouldnt have much of an impact on unemployment. The wage is still far below historical standards.

But thats a big difference than saying a jump from $5 to $10 an hour wouldnt have a noticeable affect on employment.

2. The main study in support of the minimum wage, the Card-Krueger study, contradicts later research by the same economists. See here.

3. Surveys of economists (see here) still shows a majority support the view that increasing the minimum wage harms unemployment. Which is remarkable, considering that A) the minimum wage is at a historical low (even at this low level, more economists believe that it harms employment than do not) and B) most economists entered the field assuming the minimum wage does not harm employment (as is shown by polls of the average joe).

4. All of this ignores my main complaint with the minimum wage: the minority connection. Which is why I wrote the blog in my previous comment.

5. Lastly, its important to keep in mind who the minimum wage DOES help: unions and high income areas like California, New York and New England. So the politics of the minimum wage is easy.