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Comment by panzagl | Hacker News Reader

What I want to know is how 'salaried' turned into ">=40 hours a week"

It was the other way around. Works weeks were 48 hours or more until Henry Ford enacted a five-day 40-hour week in his factory in 1926[0]. Later, in 1939, laws were passed that officially established the new only-40-hour week as the norm, with 32 hours as the official mark of full- vs part-time, and anything over 40 being deemed "overtime."

At least in the United States, that's the trend.

0. https://www.truthorfiction.com/henry-ford-invented-the-5-day...

Attributing the 5 day work week to Henry Ford is not placing the credit correctly. He may have been the first big CEO, but it was the work of labor rights activists and unions. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

The trade unionists had been pushing for eight-hour days, not five-day weeks. The thing Ford did largely unprompted was switch from six days to five days. Even your own link seems to confuse the two, but is focused on the eight-hour day part of the original false image.

> Ford’s initiative was not widely copied overnight. In 1916, the federal government passed an act to require an eight-hour day and overtime pay for railroad workers, but most workers still didn’t have those protections, and working hours remained a hotly contested issue. "Demands for the five-day week began to proliferate in 1919, a year in which 4 million American workers went out on strike,"

crediting the person who pulls the levers because they're the only person empowered to pull the levers seems dishonest.

he sure as hell didn't do it out of the goodness of his own heart.

Sure, as I said in a separate comment, he figured offering a two-day weekend would enable him to push his workers harder so that they got as much done in 48 hours as they had been doing in 48. He was still a profit-seeking capitalist, but he was considerably more forward-thinking than the majority of CEOs today, and acted far in advance of any legal requirement to do so, albeit far later than unions wanted him to.

He deserves some credit, which is what I gave him.

> albeit far later than unions wanted him to.

there we go. I don't know why acquiescence counts as creditable but whatever.

But salaries were for professionals and ownership, not labor- and while that meant if you needed to work 60 hours for a week you worked 60 hours, it also meant that if you only needed to work a thirty hour week, you worked thirty.

yes i think you put it more succinctly what i was trying to say.

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