Biden Just Saved the 40-Hour Work Week

The value of a 40-hour week had been recognized as far back as 1869, when President Ulysses S. Grant (another Republican!) mandated an eight-hour workday for all federal employees. Henry Ford, in 1926, having discovered that you got more work out of somebody when you treated him like a human being, gave factory workers two days of rest instead of the Biblical one, and likewise limited their work day to eight hours, thereby reducing their work week to 40 hours (down from the previous 60). Labor unions played no small role in creating the 40-hour week; the 1886 labor protest in Chicago known as the Haymarket Square Riot, which led to the establishment of Labor Day, began as a rally to support workers striking for an eight-hour work day. Frances Perkins accepted the job of labor secretary from President Franklin Roosevelt on condition that, among other things, the federal government put a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours worked. The Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, delivered on that promise.

The 1938 law, as revised in 1940, exempted from the 40-hour limit executive, administrative, and professional employees, creating the problem of deciding which workers fit that category. The imperfect answer is something called a “duties test,” which looks at what sort of work an individual performs. As you might guess, businesses dream up all sorts of diabolical ways to claim a maximum number of their employees as executive, administrative, or professional. To limit such shenanigans, the Labor Department stipulates that anybody who is paid less than x qualifies automatically for time-and-a-half overtime pay—duties test or no duties test.

For decades after the FLSA’s passage, the Labor Department conscientiously increased x at regular intervals to keep this wage ceiling in line with inflation. In 1940, x was $50 per week for professionals, the slipperiest of the three exempt categories. After inflation, that was the equivalent, today, of $1,124 per week, or just a whisker below today’s median weekly wage ($1,139). A 40-hour work week was guaranteed not just to the lowest-paid employees, but also to the middle class. By 1975, x was $155 per week for executives and administrators and $170 per week for professionals, a high enough ceiling to extend the 40-hour week to 65 percent of all salaried employees. In 1975—the year Saigon fell and Saturday Night Live debuted—most salaried workers in the United States qualified for overtime pay.