The 10-Hour Day

Although later movements and colorful episodes of the 1840s and 1850s were characterized by impractical utopian schemes (proposed and led by Robert Owen, Charles

Fourier, and George Henry Evans), one movement of the midcentury gained quick relief for workers: the struggle for the 10-hour day. That goal was set as early as 1835, but there was then no serious prospect of attaining it. Hope rose in 1840 when Martin Van Buren set a 10-hour day for federal employees. Craftspeople in some trades already worked no longer than 10 hours, but factory operatives still labored 12 to 14 hours a day. In the mid-1840s, New England factory workers added to the agitation for shorter hours. In 1847, the New Hampshire legislature passed the first regulatory law setting a 10-hour upper limit for a day’s work, but there was a loophole in it. The law provided that if workers agreed to work longer hours, the 10-hour limit might be exceeded. Threatened with discharge if they did not agree, factory hands found themselves no better off. Statutes passed by other state legislatures followed the same pattern, except that laws limiting the workday of children to 10 hours did not contain the hated “contract” clause.

Perhaps the most important effect of the agitation for regulatory acts was the pressure of public opinion thereby exerted on employers. Many large factories voluntarily established 11-hour days. By 1860, a 10-hour day was standard in all the craft trades, and already a new standard of 8 hours was being timorously suggested.