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Asking nicely gets you nowhere. That’s why we have unions and big government.
Which brings us to sales clerks and their crummy hours—nights, weekends, holidays. In retail, it comes with the territory—and it used to be worse.
In 1888, the average U.S. retail employee earned $10 per week for 86 hours of work while receiving no holidays, no sick pay, no pensions and no insurance. Stores commonly opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 10 p.m. There were no shifts. Clerks worked 14 hours a day, six days a week.
In 1886, West Chester clerks led by James McCabe, Howard Wilson and George Taylor tried asking employers to voluntarily reduce daily hours to 12—8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Despite some temporary successes, the international “early closing movement” failed here as it did everywhere else.
“We would do more work, have lighter hearts and be better generally by closing at 8 than at 9 or 10 o’clock,” one clerk told the Daily Local News. Shorter hours would allow clerks to attend religious and cultural events, advance themselves through study, participate in democracy and—not insignificantly—go courting.
The flaw? The movement was voluntary. No laws regulated retail hours. Store owners were free to participate, or not. Many employers were willing to cooperate, but on the condition that all other stores close, too. But there always seemed to be one who refused. Then, it was late hours again for everyone. “Ultimately, early closing highlighted the impracticability of [the voluntary] approach,” wrote Australian historians Michael Quinlan, Margaret Gardner and Peter Akers in a study of the movement there.
Work hours became an issue during the Industrial Revolution, when manufacturing moved from homes—where workers labored alone and set their own hours—to factories staffed by employees who all began and ended work at the same time. Most factories followed the precedent set by farmers—“to begin as soon in the morning and work as late at night as they could see,” wrote Henry Graham Ashmead, author of 1884’s History of Delaware County. “It was only as it progressed, and the numbers engaged therein increased, and the necessity of all being employed at one time for the general good, that it became monotonous.”
In Britain, factory hours were first restricted in 1847, with a 10-hour limit for women and children. (Men’s hours weren’t restricted until 1874.) About the same time, labor organizers began agitating the issue in Philadelphia, Manayunk and Delaware County, where Nether Providence mill workers were the core of the movement.
At a December 1847 meeting at Hinkson’s Corner, workers resolved that long hours were “particularly injurious to children employed in factories, depriving them in a majority of cases from ever acquiring the rudiments of a common education” and to women by “depriving them of the opportunity of acquiring the necessary knowledge of domestic duties to enable them to fill their stations in well-regulated households.”