Labor Day weekend has become one of those markers on the American calendar that means several things at once. It is the unofficial end of summer, a three-day weekend, perhaps one last trip or cookout before September begins in earnest.
But underneath all of that is something we rarely stop to think about: the idea that workers should have time when they are not working.
For much of the nineteenth century, that was hardly a given. Industrial workers routinely faced days stretching twelve hours or longer. Children worked in factories. Time for education, family, recreation, or simply rest had to compete with the demands of the working day.
And one of the people who spent much of his life trying to change that was George Edwin McNeill, born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, in 1837.
His introduction to the fight came remarkably early.
It Started With Fifteen Minutes
In 1852, George was fourteen years old and working at the Salisbury and Amesbury Woolen Mill when a new manager eliminated a long-standing privilege enjoyed by the workers: a fifteen-minute break in the morning and another in the afternoon.
The workers protested. About 100 walked out and were fired.
George, meanwhile, organized his fellow young workers into a mutual benefit association. They met, debated labor reform, held initiation ceremonies, and marched through the streets. The strike itself ultimately failed, but something had clearly taken hold in the teenager who participated in it.
The question at the center of that dispute would follow him for the rest of his life.
How much of a person’s day should belong to work?
It is an almost startling question to consider from our vantage point today. We complain about meetings that should have been emails and watch the clock creep toward five. We plan evenings, weekends, vacations, children’s activities, hobbies, volunteer work, and all the ordinary pieces of a life that happen outside our jobs.
George McNeill lived in a world in which the boundaries making those things possible were still being fought over.
Eight Hours for What You Will
By his twenties, McNeill had moved to Boston and become increasingly involved in politics, writing, and labor reform. In 1863, he became secretary of the Grand Eight-Hour League and emerged as one of the country’s persistent advocates for a shorter working day.
The movement’s argument could be captured in one memorable phrase:
“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”
That last part may be the most interesting.
McNeill was not simply arguing that exhausted people deserved a few additional hours of sleep. He believed workers should have enough time to educate themselves, participate in civic life, spend time with their families, pursue their own interests, and become something more than the labor they provided to an employer.
He also made an economic argument. More leisure, he believed, would allow workers to develop new interests and ambitions. Those desires would create demand for higher wages and a better standard of living, contributing in turn to greater economic activity.
The shorter workday was therefore about much more than the clock.
It was about who owned the rest of a person’s life.
McNeill advocated so persistently for the cause as a writer, speaker, and organizer that The New York Times would eventually call him the “father of the eight-hour movement.”
More Than a Producer
There is another part of McNeill’s work that helps explain what he meant by those hours “for what you will.”
In the 1870s, while monitoring the education and employment of factory children in Massachusetts, McNeill encountered children spending ten hours a day at work while receiving little schooling. His 1875 report drew attention to conditions far beyond Massachusetts, including an estimate that 100,000 children were employed in New York City factories, some as young as five to seven years old.
McNeill saw education as essential to breaking the connection between poverty and ignorance. In arguing for factory children, he wrote:
“I plead for the little ones.”
But another statement from this period reaches beyond child labor and captures something fundamental about his thinking:
“It is the blindest folly to contemplate men only as producers.”
That sentence could almost serve as the argument behind his life’s work.
A worker was not simply a pair of hands at a machine. A child was not simply another source of labor. Human beings needed time to learn, think, participate in their communities, care for one another, and pursue interests that had nothing whatsoever to do with increasing production.
They needed time in which to be people.
The Part of Labor Day We Don’t Usually Celebrate
George Edwin McNeill died in 1906, long before the modern five-day, forty-hour workweek became standard for many American workers.
He did not single-handedly create it. No one did. The eight-hour day, the five-day week, workplace protections, child labor restrictions, and Labor Day itself emerged from decades of organizing, legislation, negotiation, strikes, setbacks, and the work of countless people.
But McNeill helped make the length of the working day a question Americans could no longer ignore.
That is worth remembering over Labor Day weekend.
The three-day weekend itself isn’t George McNeill’s legacy. Something more fundamental is.
It is the assumption beneath the weekend: that some portion of our lives ought to belong to us.
Time to rest. Time to learn. Time with family and friends. Time to volunteer, garden, travel, read, make something, wander around a Highland Games, or do absolutely nothing productive at all.
Eight hours, as the old slogan put it, for what you will.
Nearly two centuries after a fourteen-year-old mill worker watched his fifteen-minute breaks disappear, perhaps the most enduring part of George McNeill’s argument is also the simplest.
We are more than what we produce.
There Is Much More to George McNeill’s Story
We have told you about one idea that consumed much of George Edwin McNeill’s life. It was hardly the only one.
His story reaches into the Knights of Labor and the international labor movement, politics and social reform, insurance and mutual aid, anti-imperialism, writing, and even poetry. He was a reformer whose interests and influence extended well beyond the cause that earned him the title “father of the eight-hour movement.”
Fortunately, much more of that story has been preserved.
Clan member Roger McNeill shared a family history originally prepared for the 2003 rededication of George’s memorial in Amesbury. Written by Janet McNeill Hively, with assistance from Roger C. McNeill and Kathryn Hively Snider, it brings together George’s family history, work, writings, and legacy. The Galley published that extensive history in its Fall/Winter 2024 issue.
If Labor Day has made you curious about the MacNeil behind the eight-hour movement, you can continue with “Story of an American Reformer: George Edwin McNeill, 1837–1906,” in Issue 69, the Fall/Winter 2024 edition of The Galley. CMAA members can read the full issue online by logging in to the member area of the Clan MacNeil Association of America website.
