40 Hour Week Quotes

Eight hours daily labor is enough for any human being

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

We propose a legal unit of $25,000 a year on family and individual incomes for the war's duration, in return for which union workers would accept non-negotiable Defense Bonds in lieu of all overtime pay for more than forty hours a week

This is far too heavy a draft upon the energies of the workmen of any industry …. The working forces [should] have time for leisure … and family life.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week.

This is 1930, not 1898. We have not only arrived at a 44-hour week but in this machine age we are arriving at the time when all workers will soon be given a 40-hour week.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

The French 35 hour work week is a bribe given to the French people by a grateful government

To me, country music's about life. It's about Monday through Friday. It's the blue-collar, 40-hour week, songs about life. It used to have more of a sound, but I think the heart of that's still the same. It's still American music.

For the privilege of seeing the color of their children's eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight like beasts in the jungle.