In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal law that currently regulates wages and hours for most employees nationwide. Among other aims, the FLSA attempted to reduce work hours by establishing a standard forty-hour work week and requiring employers to pay workers time-and-a-half for overtime. Last summer, Congress further increased the value of overtime pay through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which eliminated taxes on the overtime premium. Advocates of this change argued that workers who put in long hours were paying unfair taxes on income earned through extra effort and presented the policy as providing a tax break to deserving middle-class workers.
Others have written about how the “no tax on overtime” provision is relatively ineffectual on its own terms or bad policy on the merits. Less discussed, however, is how the policy is directly at odds with the original purpose of hours laws: to protect personal time away from work that gives American workers more control over their lives. By treating overtime as “bonus pay,” the OBBBA conceives of hours laws as a means for increasing the labor supply—its purpose is to incentivize, rather than prevent, working long hours. In response to this move, we must revive the idea, deeply rooted in the American labor movement, that we all have an equal right to the personal time necessary to pursue a good life.
The Shorter-Hours Movement
The American shorter-hours movement is almost coterminous with the nation itself. Historians David Roediger and Philip Foner, authors of the most comprehensive study on the movement, trace its origins to labor actions in New York City in the late 1780s and Philadelphia in the early 1790s. The intellectual justifications for hours laws, however, have varied remarkably across time. No fewer than five theories have featured prominently in debates over hours laws over the last two centuries: personal time, worker health and safety, consumer demand, business productivity, and work-spreading.
The early American shorter-hours movement was primarily a movement for more personal time: workers sought to enact hours rules to protect their time off the job. As labor leader Sarah Bagley wrote in 1845, when mill and factory workers in Massachusetts were averaging 12.5 hours of drudgery per day, “the great and leading object of the 10 hour movement is to give the laborer more time to attend to his or her mental, moral and physical wants.” This vision of shorter hours as personal-time protection was both individual and political. Beyond recognizing a right to free time for craft and industrial workers, shorter hours laws ensured the capacity of workers to participate in a democratic society. Labor advocates repeatedly tied the shorter-hours struggle to the war for national independence, framing the campaign as “a part of the Declaration of Independence, ‘the pursuit of happiness’” and proof that “we are not the degenerate shoots of the Liberty-sowing seed stock of ‘76.”
After the Civil War, shorter-hours arguments (now aimed at the 8-hour workday) continued to sound in personal time and the quest for freedom. Labor leaders like Ira Steward compared the eight-hour movement to the then-recent struggle for abolition. Organizers spread the now-iconic slogan, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” Yet over time, and even as many states began to pass maximum-hours laws, the theory of these new statutes changed. Many lawmakers framed hours laws as health-and-safety measures, arguments that were often grounded in sexist tropes about the roles and capacities of women. Other advocates, including notable labor leaders like Steward and William Green, began to emphasize the benefits of shorter hours for business in growing demand and firm productivity.
The onset of the Great Depression brought hours laws to the political forefront with a new strength and a new rationale. New Dealers looked to hours limits as a macroeconomic intervention to fight unemployment and underconsumption by spreading work. In 1932, the Senate passed a thirty-hour bill, but the Roosevelt Administration suppressed it in favor of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). After the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA, Congress passed a new wage-and-hour law, the FLSA. Section 7 of the FLSA—titled “maximum hours”—set a forty-hour workweek standard and required employers to pay workers extra for hours beyond this benchmark.
This statute remains the national maximum-hours law, and scholars universally accept that its primary purpose was to reduce unemployment. This point may be surprising. If you ask someone on the street today to tell you the purpose of the forty-hour work week, almost no one would respond “work-spreading.” Today, the public primarily understands the FLSA in one of two ways: as an overtime law that mandates the provision of “bonus pay” for “hard work,” or as a personal-time law that limits the length of the workweek.
Hours Laws as Bonus Pay
After World War II, the nation’s consumerist turn and the rising cost of living encouraged an income-oriented shift in the public mindset around work hours. As the economist Juliet Schor explains, the shift from a personal-time theory to a work-spreading theory of hours laws during the New Deal meant that the resolution of the economic crisis placed the labor movement “without a compelling rationale for its [shorter hours] cause.” (A similar dynamic appears in Diana Reddy’s intellectual history of labor law, which argues that the turn to macroeconomic arguments in defense of organizing protections in the New Deal rendered unavailable prior claims for protecting union rights as a matter of first moral principles when economic conditions changed.) At the same time, “the emerging climate of consumerism” encouraged long work hours to acquire new material goods, resulting in a “work and spend” trap that put “[l]eisure . . . out of the loop.” Indeed, while time at work plummeted from the 1870s to the 1950s, it has barely changed since then. Partly because of this shift, the public now often views hours laws as a way to reward workers who spend extra time at work, rather than as a means for protecting worker personal time or even reducing unemployment.
This vision culminated last year in the passage of the OBBBA’s no-tax-on-overtime provision. The no-tax-on-overtime idea originated in Alabama, where Democratic state representative Anthony Daniels introduced a bill to remove state income taxes on overtime pay in 2023. From its inception, advocates for the idea have argued that the policy would incentivize people to spend more time at work and reward those who do. As Daniels stated when introducing the bill in committee, “This is a very simple piece of legislation that should not take a whole lot of our time. It is an opportunity to provide a tax incentive for work.” The idea received immediate bipartisan interest, with Republican leadership noting that “anything we can do to incent people to work . . . seems like a good idea.” Governor Kay Ivey, signing the bill, boasted that “Alabamians have never been afraid of hard work.”
Over the following two years, President Trump and House Republicans would echo these justifications, as the provision became part of the OBBBA. The House committee report, the most substantive defense of the provision, summarized “that allowing hardworking Americans to deduct overtime compensation from income taxation encourages people to work more hours, boosting the economy and increasing individual earnings, rewarding those who work extra hours, and providing much-needed tax relief to those who contribute more to the economy.” Or, as the House Ways and Means Committee would crow during its post-OBBBA victory lap, “the new tax relief helps fulfill a fundamental American ideal: hard work will turn any dream into a reality.”
This bonus-pay vision erodes the capacity of hours laws to ensure workers have personal time for their families, interests, and communities. Phrases like “those who contribute more to the economy” and “hard work will turn any dream into a reality” act as if the real problem facing American workers is that they are not spending enough time at work. Accordingly, advocates for no tax on overtime, from both parties, have continually traded on the idea that the forty-hour workweek is no longer enough. The country, on this view, should be encouraging workers to work more, rather than strengthening hours laws to protect personal time for workers.
A Different Path Forward
The idea that Americans are working too little is, of course, absurd. Americans work a lot. Recent data shows that the average American worker spends over 1,800 hours per year on the job, a number dramatically higher than workers in many economic peers. Workers are tired, burned out, and generally searching for a “better work-life balance.” United Autoworkers President Shawn Fain said it well in recent testimony before Congress: “I know when my members look back on their lives, they never say ‘I wish I had worked more.’ They never say, ‘I wish I’d made more money.’ They say, ‘I wish I had more time.’”
Fortunately, some politicians seem to be heeding the call. In 2024, Senator Bernie Sanders held the first hearings in seventy years on shortening the forty-hour FLSA week. Sanders argued that workers need stronger hours laws to have time to take care of their families and the opportunity for well-rounded lives.
The personal-time vision of hours laws speaks to something deeply felt. We all have an equal amount of time in a day. For many people, the most meaningful parts of life—their time with their families, their pursuit of education and interests, their contributions to their communities—occur outside of their workplace. The shorter-hours movement began in recognition of these facts, along with the belief that workers had an equal right to this personal time by virtue of their humanity. These principles remain alive today and can form the basis for new action on work hours.
What would a return to a personal-time vision of hours laws look like in practice? It would include shortening the workweek, increasing the overtime premium, and banning mandatory overtime. Federal action on work hours is almost certainly out for the next few years. State and local governments, however, can help lead a shift in public policy and consciousness around work hours regulation. Cities like Philadelphia have already passed fair-workweek ordinances that require scheduling predictability, and states like New York have barred mandatory overtime for certain workers. States and cities can build on these efforts with new laws that better protect time off the job.
Importantly, it would also require a new politics around the issue of time at work. The frames through which we understand the purposes of government action condition our political priorities and naturalize contingent understandings of our experiences. “Work law, like all law,” Diana Reddy notes, “is mediated by institutionalized practices and legitimating narratives.” A widespread public narrative of hours regulation as a lever for bonus pay and incentivizing work, as opposed to a tool to protect free time, restricts our beliefs of what is possible and desirable. Senator Sanders and other advocates, by centering how workers need and deserve more personal time, have instead opened up a pathway for hours reforms that could transform the lives of many Americans.
As Elizabeth Wilkins recently wrote, “We need a set of policies and politics… that speak to our collective yearning for a good life.” Few causes could speak to that yearning more directly than a renewed push for shorter working hours.
