EP355 A short history of the 8-hour workday (and how to protect yours)

A third of your day (apart from work and sleep) is supposed to be yours. So where does it go? In 1817, labor movement activist Robert Owen coined this rallying cry: "Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will." But if you've ever tried to make that math work as a teacher, you know the catch. In those "eight hours for what you will," we have to fit commuting, cooking, cleaning, errands, caregiving, homework help, and all the invisible labor of running a life. How do we actually make space for the things that bring us joy? In this episode, I unpack the labor history most of us were never taught, and why I find it a little ironic that I now run a program called the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek. I also talk about the gendered piece of this history that rarely gets named. Women were absolutely part of the labor movement (Frances Perkins literally drafted the Fair Labor Standards Act), but they still ended up with the second shift waiting for them at home. And teachers, who are still overwhelmingly women, are living that reality every single day. I share three practical things I've learned from Katrina Onstad, author of The Weekend Effect, about how to...