Autoworkers—And All of Us—Deserve a Much Shorter Workweek

By Alex Han - In These Times, September 25, 2023

May 1886. As part of a national movement to win an eight-hour workday, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago are on strike. Police attack, killing at least one person and injuring multiple others. The next day, labor leaders organize a peaceful mass rally at Haymarket Square. A bomb goes off and police indiscriminately shoot protesters.

The confrontation became an international rallying cry for labor advocates, but it would be 54 more years before the 40-hour workweek became enshrined by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. A year later, the rapidly growing United Auto Workers brought to heel the Ford Motor Company— perhaps the most anti-union of the Big Three automakers at the time— by securing workers’ first collective bargaining agreement with the company. 

The growth of the industrial economy, along with a militant and newly organized working class, would force meaningful concessions from capital. But the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek would require a global crisis — in this case, capital’s need for labor peace during World War II — to become a reality. 

We now have the great opportunity of existing not in the midst of a single global crisis, but a ​“polycrisis.”

Read the rest of the article here.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.