There was a time when crowds of people would rush into offices at 9 and walk out after 5, and you could see the city’s workforce move from bus to bus, pavement to pavement, street too street. Fixed office hours were the norm everywhere.
Then the pandemic happened, and remote work arrangements, once a rare privilege, came to the limelight. Now, gone are the days of rigid schedules and long work commutes. The bustling American workforce has neatly adjusted itself into home offices, co-working cafes and quiet outdoor spaces.
It’s interesting to see how work schedules change with time. It makes you wonder; did people always have 9 to 5 jobs with Saturdays and Sundays off? Where did this work arrangement come from? In this article, we will take a walk down the memory lane of how modern work arrangements came about. Let’s begin.
The life of hunter-gatherers
In pre-historic years, when humans had not yet discovered agriculture, things were quite different. There was no such thing as ‘work’. Because, well…there were no bills to pay. People lived in the wilderness, nobody owned land, and there was no rent. No utility bills either- you had to take the sun, rain and wind as it came.
Only when we turned into an agricultural society, we drew the line between work and home. Earlier, groups of hunter gatherers kept moving from place to place. But once they started growing their own food, they needed a fixed place to work and live, so they started owning land. We can say this was the origin of the idea of ‘work’.
Work in the 1800s
The 70-hour-workweek
Recently, an Indian billionaire encouraged young professionals to work 70 hours a week to contribute to the progress of the country. Interestingly, the people in the 1800s would have found nothing wrong with this statement. Back then, working 70 hours a week, or more, was the norm.
According to the Weeks Report prepared by Joseph Week in 1880, working 10 to 12 hours a day was the norm in many professions like metal work, wood work, agriculture, textiles, and mining. It seems that people worked from dawn to dusk, with little leisure time as such.
The 20th Century
8 hour work day
At the dawn of the First World War, between 1910 to 1920, work hours reduced by leaps and bounds. As far back as 1820, some workers had started protesting and demanding for shorter work hours.
From the perspective of employers, work hours are a matter of demand and supply. When demand is high, production is more, and more people are hired to work longer hours. During a recession, demand is low, and less people are hired to work shorter hours- and paid less wages.
As you can see, in both these scenarios, the workers are the ones who are exploited, because they lose out on either money or leisure time. That’s why, these worker movements started arguing from an entirely new moral angle- that workers should have shorter work hours, simply because they deserve to be treated humanely- regardless of economic prosperity or recession.
In 1845, the New England Labor Reform Association sent a petition to the courts, asking them to look into the matter. For the first time, the court paid attention to labor conditions in America. The outcome was a legal cap on the number of hours laborers could spend working- 10 hours was the limit.
In 1867, the National Labor Union had its first meeting in Baltimore. The goal was to demand for an 8-hour work day. It took several years of strikes, rallies and negotiations until the Federal Public Works Act was passed in 1912- which said that any person hired by the US government must have an 8-hour work day in the contract.
World Wars and the work weeks
As people left their homes to join the army during the First World War, there was a shortage of workers. Now, workers were in a strong bargaining position, they had leverage. The US government started paying more attention to labor disputes.
The five-day work week
After the 8-hour work day, the next objective was to get paid holidays on Saturday along with Sunday. This demand was especially important for Jewish workers, for whom Friday and Saturday have a religious significance. Between 1920 and 1930, many organizations modified their work policies to accommodate the five-hour work week.
Internet and the hybrid work schedule
The widespread use of internet and gadgets made it possible for organizations to expand across geographical boundaries. As a result, technology became the key to coordinating with people across countries, even continents.
As more and more tasks were automated, electronic gadgets were added to the work flow of almost every department. Soon, these gadgets upgraded in a way that people could coordinate their tasks remotely, e.g. the shift to cloud-based set ups.
As the nature of work changed, people slowly realized that many of their tasks could be reduced to a few emails, meetings and calls. That’s how hybrid and remote work schedules became popular.
Remote work in the pre-pandemic years
The shift to remote work was not as sudden as it looks. According to a report by Statista, even before the pandemic, between 2017 to 2018, there were about 37 million people who could work from home, and 24% of them did so as a personal preference. Even back then, people reported enhanced personal well-being, work-life balance, and mental health, thanks to a remote work arrangement.
Hence, it looks like the pandemic brought attention to a work policy that was already showing positive benefits for some people, and motivated companies to implement it on a larger scale. There were many reasons for that.
With a remote work arrangement, companies would invest more in virtual infrastructure. This would enhance their ability to coordinate with overseas clients, and outsource work to other countries and continents, despite the time zone difference. Moreover, employees could take night shifts without concerns of commute and safety, especially for women.
Cut to today, a majority of job-seekers don’t mind working remotely. In fact some of them consider it a deal breaker. If you feel fascinated by the history behind modern workplace practices, I hope this article gave you a glimpse of what a work day looked like in the 18th and 19th century.
If there’s anything we can learn from the previous generations of the American workforce, it’s one thing- leverage is everything. Employees are an asset to every organization, and their well-being is important for organizational productivity.
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