How We Lost the 40-Hour Work Week (And How to Get It Back)
I used to work 70-hour weeks. Most of it was pure waste. Here's the forgotten history of the 40-hour standard, how it was stolen, and the playbook for taking our time back.
We’ve all been there. You have a job that pays you for 40 hours a week, but it’s been obvious for a long time that it’s mathematically impossible to do your work in 40 hours. Fifty, sixty hours? That’s where the pressure is. Not because the work actually needs it, but because of regulatory loopholes, incentives, and a workplace culture that decided at some point that more hours equals more value.
I still think about one week when I clocked in something like 70 hours. What broke me that week wasn’t the actual work. It was how many of those hours had been vacuumed away by meetings and multi-day email threads and “urgent” side projects that had absolutely zero bearing on our big goals. It wasn’t productivity. It was waste masquerading as dedication.
Before we can start winning it back, we need a little history refresher.
A Brief History of the 40-Hour Week
Back when the industrial era was in its infancy, a 10- to 16-hour workday wasn’t unusual, and that was in the context of six-day work weeks. In the 1880s, unionized labor started flexing its muscles in the “8-hour movement.” “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will” became a rallying cry.
Then came the bombshell in 1926 when Henry Ford shocked the world by announcing that the Ford Motor Company would adopt a 40-hour, five-day work week. Don’t get me wrong. This was not an altruistic gesture. Ford’s workers were more productive, and they had the disposable income to buy the cars they were making. But the real clincher for the rest of the country was the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The 40-hour week was now the law of the land, and overtime had to be paid at a premium. That gave employers a strong incentive to keep hours under control.
World War II scrambled things for a bit, but after that, the 40-hour work week came marching back in. So if it was such a hard-fought, economically sensible win, where did it all go so spectacularly wrong?
How the 40-Hour Week Got Stolen
The 40-hour work week didn’t just fade away. It was assassinated by a perfect storm of regulatory blind spots, economic factors, and workplace culture change.
The Salaried Trap
The Fair Labor Standards Act only applies to hourly workers. Salaried employees who are classified as “exempt” (executives, professionals, administrators) have no federal hour limits. That made sense in 1938, but today many companies use “exempt” status as a way to avoid overtime. That coordinator may be making a salary, but the second they sign that contract, the 40-hour protection evaporates.
The Digital Handcuffs
Email, laptops, and mobile phones killed the physical borders of work. Checking an email from home started as a convenience in the 1980s and inched over time to an expectation. Throw in the pandemic and “always available” suddenly started to feel normal rather than abusive. This is especially hard on journalists and nonprofit workers. The news cycle doesn’t stop on the weekend, and mission-driven organizations are especially good at making workers feel guilty for taking their own time seriously.
The Great Squeeze: Hustle as Exploitation
Starting in the 1980s, corporate downsizing, employer-sponsored healthcare, and wage stagnation came together to create an environment ripe for exploitation. Sermons about the “passion economy” were waiting to convince workers that only by putting in 80 hours a week would you ever truly love what you did.
The Badge of Busy
Working long hours is also a status symbol, particularly in competitive industries. If you’re busy, you must be important. Walking out at 5 PM, once routine, has somehow become the sign of a slacker rather than a sign of someone with their act together.
The Playbook for Getting It Back
So how do we undo the damage? The answer lies in one simple truth: most of those “extra” hours are zero value.
In 2013, Stanford economics professor John Pencavel proved it. Using data from munitions factories during World War I, Pencavel found productivity basically ground to a halt after 48 hours a week. For those working more, his numbers found that cutting hours “would have had small or no damaging effects on output.”
That inconvenient truth makes the 60-hour work week not just unsustainable, but objectively inefficient. If you’re ready to push back, here’s the playbook.
Step 1: Audit Your Hours
Track Your Time: One week of your workday in 30-minute increments. Be brutally honest. Break the activities into high-impact work (move-the-needle work) and low-impact work (non-ending email threads, pointless meetings). You will be amazed to see how those “extra” hours have been gobbled up by low-value work.
Time Block: Schedule your highest-impact projects in 2–3 hour blocks. Treat these high-value work blocks like appointments that cannot be broken.
Batch the Shallow Stuff: Emails and administrative tasks need to get done, but batch them. Schedule an hour or two each day where you get all of the low-value work done.
Step 2: Reset the Team Tempo
Push for Asynchronous Work: Not every task needs a meeting or an immediate reply. Push the use of shared documents and joint project plans that reduce the need for constant back-and-forth.
Lead by Example: You set the team tempo. If you’re a manager, use the “schedule send” feature on your email so that your team isn’t getting messages from you at 10 PM. Don’t enable an “always on” culture.
Step 3: Make Boundaries Visible
The “always available” culture is all about implicit rules, so your job is to make your rules explicit.
State Your Hours: Add your working hours to your email signature or Slack profile. “My working hours are 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM. I will respond to messages outside of this window on the next business day.” That is not aggressive. That is professional.
Frame It as a Strategy: No one likes a whiner. Frame this as a strategy. Take your time audit to your manager. “I can get you better results on our key projects if I can cut out these low-value tasks that are inflating my week to 55 hours.”
The Rally Cry
This isn’t about working less just to work less. It’s about working smarter. It’s about reclaiming that efficiency that Henry Ford understood nearly a century ago. It’s about restoring the balance of that old union cry, and finally getting back those “8 hours for what you will.”
That was not just a call for workers in 1886. It’s a call for us in 2025. The protections didn’t fade away on their own. They were taken.
Which means we can take them back.
My 70-hour week of wasted time was my breaking point. What has your experience been with the 60-hour creep? Share your story, frustrations, or any successful strategies you've discovered in the comments.
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