oh hi i'm Mr.Beat. I'm busy at work as you can see
uh well i'm pretending to be working at least yeah these are blank pages
Seriously though, I'm at work right now which is why iIm wearing a button-up shirt even though I
hate wearing button-up shirts in addition to being a youtube media sensation
I still teach high school social studies as you probably already knew teaching is a
very demanding job my students have already left for the day but i'm still here grading checking
emails and planning lessons for the next day In the United States, there’s a misconception
that teachers “have it easy” because they “have the summers off.” But if you add up all
the hours an average American teacher works each year, they still end up averaging more
than 42 hours a week, which is just about what the average American works a week.
And that sounds about right, because the 40-hour work week is pretty much the
standard for most American jobs today.
Now, as a teacher I get paid a salary, meaning I’m not paid by the hour,
but paid on a regular basis the same amount no matter the number of hours I work each day or
week. But did you know that most Americans are hourly workers?
Yep, around 59% of Americans get paid by the hour. Fortunately for them, thanks to the Fair
Labor Standards Act, they get overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours in one week. For
each hour over 40 hours worked in a week, they get one and one-half times their regular rates of pay.
Hold up hold up!
Why do we work 40 hours a week, or 8 hours a day? Where the heck does that come from?
Well, throughout most of human history, the work schedule was more fluid. Take the hunter
gatherers. Hunters hunted when they needed to hunt. Gatherers gathered when they needed to...you
know...gather. And then once agriculture became a big deal, farmers plowed their fields,
planted their seeds, harvested their crops, and fed their animals, as needed. Even today,
it’s rather ridiculous to think of farmers clocking in to work at 9:00 and clocking
out at 5. If anything, there are times of the year where they are just constantly working.
And then came the First Industrial Revolution.
You know, that huuge transition in world history where, for the first time,
fewer and fewer things were made by hand and instead made by machines,
leading to bigger and bigger factories to produce them?
The thing is, those machines helped, but factory owners still greatly relied on the productivity
of their workers. Without their workers, they would be screwed, as those expensive machines
would just be collecting dust. So factory owners kept their factories open all day long and forced,
er...I mean, ASKED their workers to work as much as possible. This led to the average factory
worker working 90 hours a week. Since the work week was usually six days a week for most workers,
90 hours a week averages out to 15 hours A DAY. Basically the workers would work and sleep. Work.
Sleep. Work. Sleep. Oh I guess they had to eat somewhere in there.
What’s crazy is that the better the technology got, the harder the workers had to work.
In the early days of the First Industrial Revolution, workers had more leverage,
so it wasn’t as intense. However, when more and more struggling farmers fled the countryside to
the cities to seek work in the early 1800s, soon there were too many available workers,
and so factory owners now had the leverage. And yeah, this is why they began to get away
with treating their workers like crap. Factory conditions sucked. Often, factories were poorly
ventilated, so the air was dirty. They were also poorly lit. Workers were on their feet
all day. And since the machines were often very dangerous, all of this combined led to
many injuries on the job. Of course, back then, if you got hurt on the job, you couldn’t work
any more so you just lost your job. And there was no compensation...no medical insurance.
Not only that, but wages were so low that sometimes women
and children also had to step in so that families could make enough money to survive.
Children as young as FIVE YEARS OLD worked in factories.
Needless to say, eventually the workers began to unite
to demand better working conditions. After all, the factory owners would be screwed if
ALL of them decided not to go into work. And thus, the labor union was born.
Before I get into unions, this video is once again sponsored by Brilliant.
Brilliant is a problem solving based website and app with a hands-on approach, with over 60
interactive courses in math, science, and computer science. Brilliant puzzles you, surprises you,
and expands your understanding of the modern world. Brilliant is the best education site I’ve
seen for developing critical reasoning skills. I’m typically not a math or science guy, and
many of you watching maybe aren't too. However, maybe if this was around when I was in school
I would have enjoyed math and science so much more. As I tried it out, I was amazed with how I
didn’t even realize my brain was being exercised. Go to brilliant.org/mrbeat and sign up for free.
Also, the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription.
Ok….as far back as 1791, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike, refusing to
go to work until they got a ten-hour work day. The eight-hour work day,
however, had its origins in Great Britain. Today, we can give a lot of credit to this dude:
Robert Owen. Owen was a wealthy industrialist, but was also one of the supposed original socialists,
man. You know, before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels came around and made it trendy. Anyway,
in 1810, Owen also had proposed a ten-hour work day for his own workers he managed in
a big textile mill. By 1817, Owen was now all about the eight-hour work day,
coming up with the slogan “Eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.”
I mean, it sounds logical, doesn’t it? Divide up the day into thirds.
A third work, a third play, a third sleep. Too bad many adults today spend
that third of supposed play time mostly working, eh? But I digress.
So the eight-hour work day started to catch on, especially in Great Britain,
which passed a law (The Factory Act of 1833) in 1833 that limited the work
for children in factories. Yep, those aged 9-13 could only work 8 hours a day.
Geez. I guess there’s a lot more to this story.
Meanwhile, across the pond, workers were beginning to organize and demanding reform. In 1835,
once again we return to Philadelphia where they organized the first general
strike in North America, led by Irish coal workers. Their banners said “From 6 to 6,
ten hours work and two hours for meals.” Over the next few years,
various American labor movement publications called specifically for an eight-hour work day.
In the 1840s and 1850s, certain workers amazingly got the 8-hour work day
in New Zealand and Australia. However, this was an anomaly.
In 1866, William Sylvis founded the National Labor Union, and one of their first demands to
the United States Congress was to get them to pass a law mandating an 8-hour work day. The law never
passed, but their efforts further popularized the idea. On May 19, 1869, U.S. President
Ulysses Grant issued a proclamation calling for an 8-hour work day for government workers.
It was during the Second Industrial Revolution that the 8-hour work day really gained steam.
Get it, steam? That was bad, I know.
In the 1870s, new labor organizations like the Knights of Labor and the Federation of Organized
Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, made the 8-hour work day their main cause.
1886 was a big year in labor rights history. That year, the Illinois Legislature passed a law
mandating 8-hour work days. However, many employers were like “nu-huh,
not gonna do it,” which led to huge worker strikes throughout Chicago. On May 1, Albert Parsons,
who led the Chicago branch of the Knights of Labor, and his wife Lucy Parsons, led a march
of 80,000 protesters down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, in what today is known as the first
modern May Day Parade. They chanted “Eight-hour day with no cut in pay.” This led to a huge
nationwide strike, of 350,000 workers at 1,200 factories. On May 3, things got tense when workers
on strike and those who were still trying to go to work started to fight. The police arrived and
ended up killing four people. At another rally the next day to protest this violence, a bomb
exploded at the Haymarket Square. In the hysteria, police rounded up hundreds of labor activists,
including Albert Parsons, and charged them with conspiracy to set off the bomb. To this day,
we don’t know who actually set off that bomb, but Parsons was among those
executed for conspiracy. This all today is simply known as the Haymarket Affair.
Many consider those executed in the Haymarket Affair martyrs, as their cause became even
more widespread afterward. Over the next few decades, more and more workers got
the 8-hour work day all around the world, starting with mostly women and children.
Despite that, in 1890 full-time manufacturing
workers were now averaging 100 hours a week. Goodness.
It was the Progressive Era that finally made the eight-hour workday not such a radical thing. It
didn’t happen all at once. There wasn’t one single event that shifted everything
dramatically to it. It was incremental. I will say, though, that Spain became the
very first country in the world to introduce a law restricting the workday to a maximum
of eight hours for everyone doing ANY kind of work on April 3, 1919.
Also, give some credit to Henry Ford, who was a pretty shady character on other issues,
but with labor he was ahead of the curve. On September 25,
1926, Ford Motor Company officially adopted a five-day, 40-hour workweek.
Wait a second, a FIVE day workweek? That’s madness. So you’re telling me they got both
Sunday AND Saturday off?!? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that sounded like a weekend.
Yes, weekends weren’t really a thing until the 1920s and 1930s. Did your head just explode?
I mean, sure British workers had been talking about the need to have two days off in a row as
early as the 1800s, but only in the 1920s and after so many workers and
laws started demanding it did companies finally had to go along with it. In 1930,
the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes even predicted that rising productivity
due to technology would shrink the average workweek to just 15 hours.
Well obviously that didn’t happen, and here we are 90 years later, still working our butts off.
According to some estimates, Americans are working more now than they have in decades, by the way.
Since this school year began, I recently estimated that I’ve been working between
65 to 70 hours a week when you add it all up. But I’m lucky,
I love my jobs. All of them. And you’re a big reason why. Thank you for watching.