when labor unions began to form and to press for fewer hours, each worker was fighting not for new protections but, says James E. Thorold Rogers, “to recover what his ancestor worked by four or five centuries ago.” In other words, people wanted to return to the same kind of working habits they had before moving to urban areas and large-scale production lines. Remember this: The fight over working hours has, from the start, been about returning to the kind of life we had for millennia.
