The whole history of one number: eight. Where it came from, who chose it, and what happened the one time a company actually ran the experiment.
Nobody measured the eight-hour day before demanding it. When a government finally checked — Britain, 1915 — it opened by admitting it had no data, then recommended sixty-five hours a week. The number eventually measured, a century later, came out at forty-nine. And the forty-hour week that became law in 1938 was never a ceiling. It was a price.
WHAT’S IN IT
· The slogan everyone attributes to Robert Owen, which he did not write.
· The movement, 1 May 1886, and Haymarket told straight.
· Henry Ford: what he actually changed, when, and why.
· The word in the Fair Labor Standards Act that does all the work.
· Kellogg’s six-hour day, 1930-1985. It worked. Workers voted it back three to one. It lost anyway.
· The four-day-week trials, and how thin the evidence under the headlines is.
· Where the leisure we were promised actually went.
No advocacy. Every figure traces to a primary or near-primary source, and where the popular version is wrong the film says so.
CHAPTERS
0:00 The number nobody chose
0:37 ACT 1 — A fourteen-hour day, and a slogan Owen never wrote
2:11 ACT 2 — A demand, not a finding: 1866 to Haymarket
3:55 ACT 3 — The first time anyone actually checked
4:32 The recommendation: sixty-five hours a week
5:23 The threshold is forty-nine
6:15 ACT 4 — What Henry Ford actually said
6:37 A turnover rate of 370 percent
7:18 September 1926, and the five-day week
8:04 ACT 5 — The law that never capped anything
8:25 Unless
9:19 ACT 6 — The company that ran the experiment
10:15 Why you should be careful with that claim
10:51 Forty years of attrition, department by department
11:27 The funeral at Stan’s Place
12:12 ACT 7 — Keynes was right about everything except us
13:20 Then the hours stopped falling
13:49 ACT 8 — What we actually know about the four-day week
14:48 The German trial, and its null results
15:54 The people not in the room
16:11 ACT 9 — The leisure arrived somewhere else
17:10 The whole thing, in four lines
RESEARCH & SOURCES
▸ Robert Owen, “Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System” (2nd edn, 1817), pp.11-12 — his demand was a twelve-hour day including meals.
▸ The 1833 eight-hour axiom — Society for Promoting National Regeneration, founded 25 Nov 1833; “The Crisis,” 7 Dec 1833, p.117.
▸ Haymarket — Avrich, “The Haymarket Tragedy” (Princeton UP, 1984); Green, “Death in the Haymarket” (Pantheon, 2006); dissenting: Messer-Kruse (2011). Altgeld’s pardon, 26 June 1893.
▸ “Industrial Health and Efficiency: Final Report of the British Health of Munition Workers Committee,” US BLS Bulletin 249 (GPO, 1919) — the “almost complete absence of any scientific data” admission, and the 65-67 hour recommendation. The 48-hour corroboration: Brown & Baker (1942) on US WWII armaments plants.
▸ John Pencavel, “The Productivity of Working Hours,” Economic Journal 125(589), 2015, 2052-2076 — the 49-hour threshold, and the ten percent cost of the seventh day. doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12166
▸ Ford — Raff & Summers, “Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?”, J. Labor Economics 5(4 pt 2), 1987; the 370% turnover figure originates with Slichter, “The Turnover of Factory Labor” (1921), p.244. Ford’s own words: interviewed by Samuel Crowther, “Why I Favor Five Days’ Work With Six Days’ Pay,” World’s Work, Oct 1926.
▸ Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, §7(a). Current US Department of Labor guidance: “There is no limit on the number of hours employees 16 years or older may work in any workweek.”
▸ Kellogg — Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, “Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day” (Temple UP, 1996), and Business History Review 66(3), 1992, 475-522. doi.org/10.2307/3116979
▸ Contemporaneous Kellogg record — Monthly Labor Review 32(1) 1931; 32(6) 1931 pp.148-155; 42(1) 1936 pp.179-180. The payroll audit: Ethel L. Best, “A Study of a Change from 8 to 6 Hours of Work,” Women’s Bureau Bulletin 105 (GPO, 1933).
▸ J. M. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), in “Essays in Persuasion” (1931). Growth scorecard: Maddison Project Database 2023.
▸ Long-run hours — Huberman & Minns, Explorations in Economic History 44(3), 2007, 538-567 (doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2007.03.002); OECD, 2024. The two are not the same measure and the film says so.
▸ Four-day week — Fan, Schor, Kelly & Gu, Nature Human Behaviour 9(10), 2025, 2153-2168 (doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02259-6); “The Results Are In: The UK’s Four-Day Week Pilot” (Autonomy/Boston College/Cambridge, 2023); Haraldsson & Kellam, “Going Public” on Iceland (Autonomy/Alda, 2021); Backmann & Hoch et al., the German pilot and its two-year follow-up (Univ. Münster / Intraprenör, 2024, 2026).
▸ Where the leisure went — Aguiar & Hurst, QJE 122(3), 2007, 969-1006; Kuhn & Lozano, J. Labor Economics 26(2), 2008, 311-343; US BLS American Time Use Survey, 2025.
#EightHourDay #HistoryOfWork #FourDayWeek #LabourHistory #Keynes #Kellogg
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