The Revolutionary Fight of the Working Class for a Shorter Work Week

Jun 9, 2025

The first recorded fights of the American working class were to reduce the hours of work from 14 or even 16 hours of work in a day. In 1791, Philadelphia carpenters struck to set a limit of 10 hours. In 1835, a general strike in Philadelphia demanded 10 hours of work, two hours for meals. The first strikes were smashed or isolated.

As Karl Marx pointed out: “Every independent movement of the American workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in white skin where in the black it is branded.”

It took the Civil War and Reconstruction to initiate the deep-seated movement which led to a general strike for the eight-hour day that began on May 1, 1886. That strike was the height of the movement, the force that pushed forward a real reduction in hours all over the country over the next few decades.

Those struggles were led by working-class militants who understood that capitalism was the problem, and that for workers ever to have time for themselves, they would have to wrench power out of the capitalists’ hands; workers who understood that the struggle could not succeed unless the whole working class was involved.

The struggle for the eight-hour day has never been completed—and will not be so long as capitalism is allowed to rule over the country, determining our very lives.

What follows are excerpts from a presentation in Detroit on June 1. The presentation was followed by a spirited discussion by workers incorporating their own experiences….

Hello everyone. And welcome to the Spark meeting about the eight-hour day. Yes, International Workers Day was May first. So, we are a month late. But in May it was all Musk, all DOGE, all the time, and we had to deal with that. But, never too late, for this question: WHY don’t we ALREADY HAVE the eight-hour work day? Why are we under so much pressure to work longer and longer hours, even while we are creating so much extra wealth and value that we should be able to have an easier life and enjoy it? This makes no sense at all and it has not made sense for a long time now.

These days I hear more and more of the younger workers talk about getting more hours, getting more hours. The pay is so low for most workers, they need to get more hours just to pay basic bills. I saw a story about a driver for Uber Eats, in New York City. He starts work at 8 in the morning and he drives until 11 at night. If he took his daily pay and put it into eight hours it would be $32 an hour. Not much to live on in New York—but he has to drive 15 hours to make it.

The Gig Economy

For most workers, eight-hour days, 40-hour weeks, are long gone. You got to have a regular job plus at least one side job. They call this the gig economy. Now, I retired in 2002, before gig economy was a thing. But even so, even working that supposedly “good” Chrysler job, I never had an eight-hour day, because to me an eight-hour day was when you could work your eight hours and go home and take care of home. Never had that right. If they called nine hours you had to stay nine. If they called Saturday you had to come in. It stole your life. The life you wanted to have. And all the company had to do was pay a little overtime, for their right to keep you away from your life.

But we could, back then, we could leave at nine hours. Chrysler workers still had that right: only nine hours was mandatory. I don’t recall the year we lost it. I think somewhere in the late 90s. But I recall the way very well. The line was stopped and we were called to a town hall meeting up by the offices, and the UAW vice president in charge of Chrysler was there. He said the union had signed off on 10 hours mandatory to help the company, and that was that. Be glad you got a job. Never mind about your life.

Even today, the UAW won’t do any better. Just two years ago we had a strike where one of the demands was supposed to be work-life balance. They settled that strike with a WORSE work-life balance than we went in with! With more pressure on your attendance, more pressure to work sick, and almost all of the unlimited overtime exemptions still in place.

Working time is the LAST thing a company will give up! They will fight their longest and hardest battles to extend the hours of work, to shorten your break time, to steal more and more of your life and your energy for themselves. Because that is where their profit comes from. They buy your labor power, your ability to work, and you work those hours and create value.

Labor Creates Value

Everything you work on leaves your hands as a more valuable commodity than when it came to you, because you have put in your part of the needed work to create that truck they will sell for $90,000, or to process the data needed to complete a project. But your pay is below the value that you put in! Your work has added more value than you are paid for. There is a surplus of value in your product, and when it’s sold, the boss pockets that surplus and says, “I paid you what you agreed to. Be glad you got a job.” The key is that the longer he can keep you on the job in a day, the more surplus you will produce for him in a day. And the capitalist is a greedy bastard. He’s never got enough.

It was Karl Marx who developed this analysis of how capitalists steal surplus value from workers’ labor. Marx therefore said that the interests of capital in taking more, and the interests of labor in giving up less, these interests are completely and forever opposed to each other. If workers are ever to stop being exploited, we will have to organize well enough to overthrow the capitalist system entirely and take over the running of society ourselves. With the wonders of modern technology under our communal ownership, and with the immense quantity of the world’s capital under our communal control, the way will be wide open to a communist society of free, equal, and highly developed human beings.…

… The American Dream Fades Out

From 1950 to 1970 the U.S. economy expanded … and the American Dream, 40 hours and all, did not seem all that far out of reach for most workers. Only, if you were those suffering in segregation and discrimination, the American Nightmare ran right on. But starting in the early 1970s, the average workweek in the whole U.S. began to get longer. Economic crisis, cycles of recessions and stagnation set in, amidst one wave after another of plant closings and mass layoffs. Employers used the overhanging threat of unemployment to force the remaining workers to work harder—and longer.

By the mid-1990s, production and non-supervisory employees were working the equivalent of more than six extra weeks a year, 250 more hours a year than they did in the early 1970s. Work hours remain at extremely high levels today for most of the workforce, like that Uber driver. Whatever gains workers made in the past, through decades and decades of hard struggle, over and over again, are being wiped out as we watch.

Now we have Sergei Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, telling his AI team that he expects them in the office six days a week, and that 60 hours a week is what he considers the “sweet spot” of productivity! So, they are working with AI that is supposed to do so much work in place of humans, that humans will hardly be needed—but they are being told they have to work 60 hours a week!

Under the capitalist system no gains for workers are ever safe or permanent. Anything and everything that the workers gain is liable to be sacrificed later, on the altar of capitalist profit and enrichment. The first sacrifice demanded is the amount of time we once won for ourselves. Making surplus value for the boss must come first!

Life Beyond Capitalism

But with our enormous increases in productivity of labor, multiplied many, many times by computers and automation just over the last decades, people should be able to work only a few hours a week—completely transforming the nature of work. The burden of long work hours should disappear. All people could lead much richer and fuller lives, with talents developed all around. The only thing in the way is the capitalist system.

The mission and the destiny of the working class is to take away that power and control. We are already at the center of the world economy. We do all the work. We make everything run. We know what it takes. And we also know where the stupid stuff can be eliminated! We can do it better. Much better. But first we have to rip social, political power out of the hands of the capitalist class that has it now. We have to get that big picture in focus. We have to upgrade our sights. We need to prepare our class to fight to extinguish capitalism, worldwide, so it can never come back. And gain control of our own lives. For real.