Office Quandries
Peter Rachleff
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PUNCHING OUT page 3 of 4 | |||||
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Weekly Answers to Office Quandries |
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Professor Peter Rachleff |
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On May 1, hundreds of thousands of workers across the
country walked off their jobs. Chicago was the center of the movement,
and
there was a dramatic showdown there on May 4, at the McCormick Harvester
Works in Haymarket Square. The Knights of Labor held a rally at the plant
gates to promote their issue and spread the strike. Police attacked the
rally on the grounds that its organizers had not obtained a permit.
Someone
threw a bomb into the ranks of the police, and two were killed. Police
opened fire on the crowd, killing half a dozen people. The leaders of the
Knights of Labor were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit
murder.
Several of them were convicted and executed. The movement collapsed and
faded away.
Limiting the workday to eight hours did not become mandatory until World War I. It took the extraordinary conditions of wartime--full employment and a revived labor movement--to force this standard on the nation. But the law was carefully written. It did not prohibit employers from requiring workers to put in more than eight hours. It only required overtime pay for hours beyond eight. And it left all further refinement and regulation up to individual states. Precious little got done after this to make life better for workers. Indeed, in recent years, the average work week has gotten longer--it's up to 43 hours, resulting in our working 160 more hours per year than we did twenty years ago. |
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