![]() The first survey, known as the Weeks Report, was prepared by Joseph Weeks as part of the Census of 1880. Much of what is known about average work hours in the nineteenth century comes from two surveys of manufacturing hours taken by the federal government. ![]() The Census of Manufactures began to collect this information in 1880 but earlier estimates are available. Our most reliable estimates of the workweek come from manufacturing, since most employers required that manufacturing workers remain at work during precisely specified hours. Ransom and Sutch (1977) and Ng and Virts (1989) estimate that annual labor hours per capita fell 26 to 35 percent among African-Americans with the end of slavery. On the other hand, it is clear that working hours declined substantially for one important group. Finally, Margo (2000) estimates that “on an economy-wide basis, it is probable that annual hours of work rose over the (nineteenth) century, by around 10 percent.” He credits this rise to the shift out of agriculture, a decline in the seasonality of labor demand and reductions in annual periods of nonemployment. Weiss and Craig (1993) find evidence suggesting that agricultural workers also increased their hours of work between 18. Fogel and Engerman (1977) argue that agricultural hours in the North increased before the Civil War due to the shift into time-intensive dairy and livestock. Gallman (1975) calculates “changes in implicit hours of work per agricultural worker” and estimates that hours increased 11 to 18 percent from 1800 to 1850. Others are skeptical of such claims and argue that work hours increased during the nineteenth century - especially its first half. Some observers believe that most American workers adopted the practice of working from “first light to dark” - filling all their free hours with work - throughout the colonial period and into the nineteenth century. This workday was considerably longer than for English laborers, who at the time probably averaged closer to six hours of heavy labor each day. The Colonial Periodīased on the amount of work performed - for example, crops raised per worker - Carr (1992) concludes that in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region, “for at least six months of the year, an eight to ten-hour day of hard labor was necessary.” This does not account for other required tasks, which probably took about three hours per day. Therefore, estimates of the length of the typical workweek before the mid-1800s are very imprecise. Often the distinction between work time and leisure time was blurry. Like self-employed workers in other fields, they saw no reason to record the amount of time they spent working. Before the Civil War most Americans were employed in agriculture and most of these were self-employed. ![]() Estimating the length of the historical workweek is even more troublesome. Measuring the length of the workweek (or workday or workyear) is a difficult task, full of ambiguities concerning what constitutes work and who is to be considered a worker. ![]() This article presents estimates of the length of the historical workweek in the U.S., describes the history of the shorter-hours “movement,” and examines the forces that drove the workweek’s decline over time. Since then the workweek’s length has decreased considerably. In the 1800s, many Americans worked seventy hours or more per week and the length of the workweek became an important political issue.
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