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A 30-hour workweek in America? It nearly became law
During the Great Depression, the Senate passed — and President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported — a bill to establish a standard 30-hour workweek. Then it got derailed.
During the next 100 days, Roosevelt and his Cabinet guided more than a dozen major bills through the House and Senate, stabilizing the banking system, regulating Wall Street, subsidizing farmers and getting relief checks into the hands of the unemployed. “Instead of looking at the increase in leisure as inevitable or as potentially beneficial,” Hunnicutt wrote, they feared that if workers got a taste of a 30-hour week, they would never want to go back to longer workdays, and the law would become permanent. Roosevelt used the threat of it as leverage to get industry leaders to agree to ban child labor, set a modest minimum wage and limit the standard workweek to 40 hours, Hunnicutt wrote.
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