Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Forty-Hour Week Was a Lie: How a 1938 Price Signal Became American Labor's Most Convenient Fiction

The Forty-Hour Week Was a Lie: How a 1938 Price Signal Became American Labor's Most Convenient Fiction

Fleet, Alex

Paperback

Social Movements

ISBN13: 9798174695924
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 16 2026
Pages: 28
Weight: 0.11
Height: 0.06 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The forty-hour week was never a target. It was a ceiling, written into law as the point after which employers had to start paying more, and it was designed to make long hours expensive rather than to describe a normal working life. This short book traces how a legal maximum became a cultural minimum, and then stopped being either. It starts with the statute and what it actually says, then follows the white-collar exemption and the slow creep of the salaried job, where the hours stopped being counted because nobody was required to count them. It looks at how many hours Americans actually work, as opposed to how many they are assumed to, and sets out three policy choices that produced the gap. From there the timeline: 2008 and what a recession does to bargaining power, the smartphone and the end of the workday having an edge, the pandemic and what remote work did to hours rather than to commutes, and where the forty-hour week stands in 2026. Chapter 9 is called What I Am and Am Not Claiming, and it is there because an argument like this one attracts overreach. The book states its limits before a reader has to find them. Chapter 10 sets out what honest framing would look like, and Chapter 11 is a personal accounting, in which the author applies the argument to their own hours rather than only to everyone else's. Sources and further reading are listed in full. A short, documented argument about a number almost everyone repeats and almost nobody checks.

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