[red-iron-pine]

The only reason you have a 40 hour workday are due to constant rioting and unrest. these strikes weren't just unhappy people with picket signs, they literally "called in the Pinkertons" to beat them into submission, and most of the strikes going back to the 1800s had some component of violence.

Apropos of the date, the Pullman Strikes are the reason we have Labor Day as a national holiday. 70 people died during that strike and around 60 more were seriously wounded. Violence was common during strikes in the 1800s, but Pullman was especially chaotic -- but par for the course as global labor struggles went.