As Canada confronts U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff and other threats to our economy, much of the discussion has focused on protecting jobs, maintaining competitiveness and ensuring that Canadian workers can withstand another period of serious disruption.
Labour Day offers an opportunity to ask: what kind of jobs, economy and working lives are we trying to protect?
For generations, workers have fought to shorten the working day. Just as the six-day, 72-hour workweek seemed natural a century ago, the five-day 40-hour workweek seems like an immutable fact of life today. But it is far from that.
The eight-hour day was based on a simple proposition: human beings should not have to spend most of their waking lives at work to earn a living. They should also have time to raise children, participate in communities, rest, educate themselves and enjoy life beyond the workplace.
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The standard 40-hour workweek and eight-hour working day emerged from the particular political struggles and economic conditions of the two previous centuries. It was institutionalized through labour law and collective bargaining because workers organized to make it happen.
But there is no economic law that says eight hours a day, five days a week, is the appropriate amount of labour for a human being.
In fact, the apparent universality of this post-Second World War standard masks how labour protections across Canada actually remain deeply different across occupations, class, gender, race and immigration status. Many workers are only partially protected or excluded altogether.
The 40-hour workweek was less a universal norm than a historically specific exception — one whose prominence often obscured the inequalities that persisted beneath the surface of postwar prosperity.
Indeed, the remarkable feature of the last century is how little the basic structure of the working week has changed despite enormous increases in productivity.
Canadian workers today can produce vastly more in an hour than workers even a generation ago. Yet, the ratio of that productivity growth that goes to corporate profits versus worker compensation has averaged 10-to-1 over roughly the last four decades.
As Canada is inevitably forced to confront a more uncertain economic environment because of Trump, there will be calls for greater productivity, competitiveness and labour-market flexibility. Workers will once again be told that everyone must contribute to the national economic effort.
But as the long history of labour in Canada has shown repeatedly, those sacrifices are far from shared equally.
Since the 1980s, stable full-time employment has increasingly been outpaced by part-time, temporary, contract, self-employed and gig work. Some workers face excessive hours, while others cannot obtain enough. Some have predictable schedules, while others are expected to remain available whenever demand arises.
The result is a labour market characterized by both overwork and underemployment.
Platform labour — task-based work procured through online and mobile applications — makes this contradiction particularly visible. Gig workers are formally free to choose when they work, but algorithmic management, ratings, dynamic pricing and piece-rate compensation can create powerful incentives to remain continuously available.
Gig workers thus possess the formal freedom of the self-employed while facing many of the material constraints of the piece-rate worker of the 19th century.
The boundary between working and not working has also become increasingly porous. Email, smartphones, workplace messaging apps and remote technologies mean the working day can extend into off-hours, weekends and holidays without any formal change to contracted hours, let alone pay.
In this sense, the problem is not simply that the 40-hour week is too long. It is that the 40-hour week is no longer an accurate description.
Official statistics can obscure this reality. Although the average work week in Canada has declined to around 35.7 hours today from about 37.5 hours in 1990, total working hours have increased.
For example, many households have resorted to offsetting stagnant real wages by expanding their total labour hours. Women’s labour-force participation rates have risen significantly, while students increasingly balance their education with employment and many people take on side gigs.
Likewise, work intensity has increased. Part-time workers, older workers, the self-employed and workers in agriculture, natural resources, transportation and construction are much more likely to work long hours, as well as face a higher likelihood of unpaid overtime.
Nearly one-third of working Canadians report that work demands interfere with home and family life — a figure that varies widely by province, from roughly one-quarter in Quebec and New Brunswick to more than one-third in Alberta.
The Canadian experience since the 1990s is therefore less a story of steadily declining working time and more a story of labour-market fragmentation, growing household labour supply and widening inequalities in the distribution of working hours that has driven a cost of living crisis.
Workers may spend fewer hours in any single job while devoting more of their lives to paid employment.
In light of this, we should ask ourselves why the traditional workweek remains the default model. Forcing workers back into offices during an energy crisis exposes just how irrational our baseline working habits have become.
Widespread popular interest in the four-day workweek indicates an appetite for change. But the issue is not whether every worker should have Monday or Friday off. It is whether society can use productivity growth and technological change to systematically reduce the amount of time people must spend working to live a good life.
A shorter standard workweek must not simply reproduce existing inequalities by granting more leisure to some people while leaving others scrambling for sufficient paid hours.
There should be multiple goals: shorter standard hours for those who want them; predictable schedules; adequate minimum hours for those who need them; protection against unpaid availability; living wages and stronger rights for workers outside traditional employment relationships.
The length of the working day has always been contested because time is valuable. Employers purchase labour, but workers can sell only a finite amount of their life. Every hour spent working is an hour that cannot be spent with family, in a community, caring for others, resting or simply doing nothing.
The 40-hour workweek was once a radical demand for freedom. Workers organized, fought for it and won. This Labour Day, perhaps it’s time to imagine what comes next.
This article is based on “Contested Hours: The Long Struggle Over Working Time in Canada,” co-authored with Theryn Arnold, forthcoming in the Journal of Labor and Society.
