Comic Strips

There's some truth to that. Unions got us the 8 hour work day, after decades of strikes made bloody by companies and cops. Unions were also working on establishing a "weekend", for decades, and only making slow, incremental progress.

When Henry Ford introduced the assembly line, it was able to make cars more efficiently and quickly. But, it was backbreaking work. Many of Ford's workers quit after only a few months. Because training new workers was inefficient, Ford decided it was in his company's best interest to offer the workers more pay and more time off. Workers liked that deal, so his turnover rate dropped and his factories ran more efficiently.

Eventually he settled on a 40 hour work week with 2 weekend days. He claimed it was for a more noble purpose, of giving workers more money and time off so they could spend more money on everything, including his cars. Maybe it was just a purely selfish calculation though, that to run his factories as efficiently as possible he needed to make the conditions and compensation such that people would stick around and not force him to train up new workers so often.