For nearly two years, Tom Allen clocked into his job at a defense hardware plant in Lansing, Mich. in the afternoon to start a 12-hour shift, usually operating a metal lathe machine. The hours were long, but the overtime pay was welcome. Still, at the end of the week, Allen said, he'd get home Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m. so tired he'd sleep until dinnertime.
"By Sunday night you felt pretty good," Allen, 63, said in an interview. "Then it started all over again."
But when the company, Demmer Corporation, told him he had to work on Saturdays and Sundays as well, Allen refused. "I literally told them, 'I'm not going to have a heart attack and die in the traces just so you guys can make a little extra money.'"
Demmer fired him in December 2010 and has appealed his unemployment claim, saying he had no proof he'd been promised only 60 hours and he had no right to skip shifts. In August, a Michigan court sided with Demmer.
Eighty-four hours per week -- that's the kind of schedule Americans worked more than 200 years ago, back when there was no cure for "consumption" and happiness was a revolutionary pursuit. Americans fought and fought to get those hours down.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers went on strike thousands of times and bled to death in the streets in the struggle against long hours, which they argued were dangerous and inhumane. They demanded "time to eat, time to live, time to be happy, time to be a person," as one union worker put it in 1919, using terms that ring no less true today.
Back then, labor advocates linked the problems of the over- and under-employed, arguing shorter hours would reduce joblessness by spreading work around. The argument applied whether it justified reducing the workweek from 72 to 60 hours or 40 to 30. Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor until his death in 1924, put it this way: "So long as there is one who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of labor are too long."