Workers

Washington Post - The nature of work underwent a profound shift during the covid pandemic. Millions of office workers began working from home, and then many shifted to a hybrid schedule. Some businesses, such as Kickstarter, experimented with four-day workweeks — without reducing salaries. In Congress, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to make a 32-hour workweek standard, then reintroduced it last year.This “great reassessment” of labor feels revolutionary. But we’ve been here before. In 1933 the Senate passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported, a bill to reduce the standard workweek to only 30 hours.

Americans have worked hard, perhaps too hard, since the Colonial era. English and other European colonists often had to work longer and harder on farms here than in the Old World, and a philosophy of working from sunrise to sunset prevailed, according to the Economic History Association. The Massachusetts colony even passed a law requiring a 10-hour minimum workday.  MORE

The Guardian - Thousands of US hotel workers went on strike on Sunday for improved pay and conditions in a dispute likely to disrupt many Labor Day weekend holiday travelers, amid union warnings that industrial action could escalate. More than 10,000 workers walked off the job at hotels in Boston, Seattle, Honolulu, Kauai and Greenwich, Connecticut, as well as the Californian cities of San Francisco, Sand Diego and San Jose after contract talks with the establishments’ owners collapsed.