The forty-hour work week is so deeply embedded in Canadian working life that it can seem like a natural feature of the economy rather than a hard-won political achievement. It was neither natural nor inevitable. It took more than a century of organising, strikes and legislative campaigning to reduce the standard working week from sixty or seventy hours to the forty that most full-time workers now expect. That reduction is one of the labour movement's most significant lasting contributions to the quality of working life.

The Baseline: What Work Looked Like Before

In nineteenth-century Canada, twelve-hour workdays and six-day work weeks were standard in most industries. Factory workers, miners and tradespeople routinely worked seventy-two hours per week or more. Children worked alongside adults. There were no statutory limits on hours, no mandatory rest periods, and no premium pay for overtime. Exhaustion-related injuries were common, and workers who were injured or ill had no income replacement.

The ideological justification for long hours was simple: labour was a commodity, and employers had the right to purchase as much of it as the market allowed. Workers who objected could leave — and face starvation, since there was no social safety net. The system was self-reinforcing: long hours depressed wages by keeping workers too tired to organise, while low wages made long hours seem necessary for survival.

The Nine-Hour Movement

The first significant organised campaign to reduce working hours in Canada was the Nine-Hour Movement of the early 1870s. Centred initially in Hamilton and Toronto, the movement demanded a reduction of the standard workday from ten or twelve hours to nine. Workers argued that shorter hours would improve health, allow time for education and civic participation, and — critically — that the same amount of work could be accomplished in nine hours by a rested worker as in twelve by an exhausted one.

The Nine-Hour Movement produced Canada's first major labour confrontation and contributed to the legal recognition of unions in 1872. But it did not win the nine-hour day for most workers. Industrial employers resisted, and the movement fragmented before achieving its central demand. The campaign nonetheless established that shorter hours were a legitimate demand, not a radical fantasy.

The Eight-Hour Day Campaign

By the late nineteenth century, the demand had shifted from nine hours to eight. The slogan "Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will" circulated through the international labour movement. In Canada, the eight-hour day was won sector by sector through collective agreements and, eventually, through legislation.

Federal government employees were among the first to win an eight-hour standard, in the early twentieth century, partly because of sustained lobbying by the Trades and Labour Congress and partly because the federal government was a more tractable employer than private industry. Provincial legislation came more slowly and more patchwork — different provinces at different times, with different definitions of what counted as work and what industries were covered.

Wartime and the Forty-Hour Standard

The Second World War paradoxically accelerated the push for shorter standard hours even as it produced enormous overtime demands. The wartime labour shortage gave unions greater bargaining power, and many wartime collective agreements included provisions for overtime pay after a set number of hours — typically forty per week. Premium pay for overtime created an incentive for employers to hire additional workers rather than work existing workers into additional hours, which supported both employment levels and the implicit norm of the forty-hour week.

After the war, the forty-hour standard was broadly incorporated into Canadian collective agreements across manufacturing, mining and public sector employment. The Canada Labour Code, consolidated in the late 1960s, established the forty-hour week as the federal overtime threshold, with provincial employment standards legislation adopting similar standards over the following years.

Ontario's Hours of Work Provisions

Under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, the standard work week is forty-four hours, with overtime pay required for hours beyond that threshold. The lower forty-hour standard is more common in collective agreements than in statute — one of many areas where bargaining produces better outcomes than minimum legislation. Employees and employers can agree in writing to "averaging" arrangements that allow hours to be calculated over a longer period, a provision that has become more common and more contested in the gig and retail economy.

The question of unpaid overtime — hours that workers put in without compensation, particularly in professional and managerial roles — has been the subject of ongoing litigation and legislative debate. Class action lawsuits against major employers have recovered tens of millions of dollars for employees denied overtime pay they were legally owed.

The Thirty-Two-Hour Conversation

In recent years, a growing movement has advocated for a further reduction: the thirty-two-hour, or four-day, work week. Proponents cite pilot programs in Iceland, Japan and the United Kingdom showing that productivity either held steady or improved when hours were reduced, while worker wellbeing — measured by stress, sleep, and reported satisfaction — improved substantially.

In Canada, the New Democratic Party has proposed federal legislation to move toward a four-day work week for federally regulated workers. Several cities and organisations have conducted their own pilot programs. The arguments echo those made for the eight-hour day a century ago: workers are more productive when rested, and the same work can be done in less time with better organisation.

The debate will unfold over the coming years in collective bargaining, in provincial and federal legislatures, and in individual workplaces. As it does, it is worth remembering that the forty-hour week itself was once considered an unachievable demand. For information on current standards and campaigns, visit the Canadian Labour Congress.