250 Years of Work in America: How Did We Get Here?

How did we get here? 250 years of work in America. That's today on What the Heck is Happening in HR. For our podcast disclaimer, please visit the episode description.

Welcome to What the Heck is Happening in HR. I'm Kelly Rexrode. America turns 250 years old. I couldn't let it go by without doing something a little differently.

This week, I have three episodes I'm publishing around this July 4th. We want to talk about where work came from, the presidents who shaped it, and let's just take a guess at what we might be headed for in the next 250 years. Today, we're going to talk about the origin story. I'm going to have to be the most entertaining HR nerd you've ever listened to.

You have my word because I'm kind of a history nut and working in HR I had to do this. So let's talk about America in 1776 and what work actually looked like and let's recalibrate your perspective. The year of the Declaration of Independence was signed. 1776, there was no minimum wage.

There was no 40-hour work week, no OSHA, no FMLA, no Title VII, no ACA, no HR department, no performance review, no employee handbook. And there certainly was no such thing as employment law in any meaningful sense. And most of the people doing the work had absolutely no legal protection whatsoever. So let's talk about the workforce nobody wants to talk about first, and we're going to say it plainly.

In 1776, there was an estimated 500,000 people in America that were enslaved, classified as property, not workers. They were indentured servants. They were slaves. They were interned, if you will, to someone else.

The economic engine of many of the colonies ran almost entirely on forced labor. And that was the foundation of work in America. The rest of the history, every law every protection every right is built in the shadow of that fact HR professionals need to know this is not to feel guilt but because understanding where systems came from help us understand why some gaps have been so hard to close. One of the sections I talk about in my HR Core Concepts class is the history of HR.

And it's always one of the favorite sections because people didn't understand that there wasn't anything and what happened and what came and what the why was behind so many of the laws. And then we enter the industrial era when work became dangerous. We're going to fast forward to the mid-1800s. Industrial revolution changed everything.

Factories, mills, mines, railroad, people working 12, 14, 16 hours a day, children working alongside adults, starting as young as five or six. No safety standards, routine injuries, routine deaths. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 was a big one. 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died.

The doors were locked from the outside to prevent breaks. The single event accelerated the labor reform movement in ways that shaped everything that came after. Yes, the labor movement changed the game. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw organized labor fight for things that we now take for granted.

Eight-hour workday, safe working conditions, the right to organize, child labor protections, weekends, paid leave. None of those things were gifts from employers. Every single thing was fought for, sometimes literally, by workers who decided enough was enough. I mean, even Henry Ford, when he put in his $5 a day wage, he had stipulations.

There couldn't be any violence at home. There couldn't be any drinking. You had to keep a tidy house in order to earn that wage. These were all items decided by workers.

The federal government entered the workplace with the New Deal. The Great Depression changed American work forever. One-third of the country was unemployed. Wages collapsed.

Child labor was rampant. People were working brutal hours for whatever anyone would pay them. FDR's New Deal responded with the two most foundational pieces of workplace legislation in American history the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 protecting workers right to organize And the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 establishing the first federal minimum wage 25 cents an hour. That was the floor.

And it was fought over like it was a fortune. But that Fair Labor Standards Act also established a 40-hour work week. Before 1938, there was no federal standards to say how many hours you would be required to work. Employers could and did require 60, 70, 80 hours with no overtime.

That idea of working more than 40 hours requiring additional compensation? What? That was radical. But that was legislation.

the civil rights era is when the workplace got a conscience. After World War II, returning soldiers expected more. The civil rights movement demanded more. And in 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.

Title VII, the part HR lives in, made employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin illegal. And for the first time in American history, It was legally wrong to refuse to hire someone because of who they were. So from there to here, what's that timeline? 1967, Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

You can't discriminate against workers 40 years and older. 1970, OSHA. Workers have a right to a safe workplace. 1978, Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

You can't fire someone for being pregnant. 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Employers must verify work authorization. Hello, I-9.

1990 Americans and Disabilities Act. Workplace access and accommodation for people with disabilities. 1993 Family Medical Leave Act. 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.

2009, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, closing the window on pay discrimination claims. 2010, Affordable Care Act, the employer mandate changes on how every HR team in America manages healthcare. 2022, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, filling the gaps the Pregnancy Discrimination Act left behind. Each one was a fight.

Each one expanded who's protected and how. I want to pause in 1986 for a second because this one lives in HR every single day The Immigration Reform and Control Act made it illegal to normally hire someone without work authorization and it created something every HR professional knows intimately The I-9, that one form, was two pages, is now a federal compliance requirement for every single higher. And it has evolved continuously since 1986. E-Verify, remote verification changes during the pandemic, electronic I-9 options, worksite enforcement audits that result in significant fines, even for paperwork errors.

Immigration compliance is not just a border police conversation. It's a daily HR operations reality and the stakes for getting it wrong are real. the ACA changed benefits permanently compliance changed and in 2010 we had the Affordable Care Act the ACA didn't change who could get health care it changed the employer's role in the health care system permanently for organizations with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees offering affordable minimum value health coverage became a legal requirement not best practice, not competitive practice, a mandate.

HR teams had to learn a new language almost overnight. Full-time equivalent calculations, measurement periods, affordability, safe harbors, 1095C reporting, the employer's shared responsibility payment, affordability. Benefits administration was never the same after 2010. And for HR professionals who lived through the implementation, you know exactly what I mean.

So for 250 years ago, it's changed a lot. Back then, work in America had no floor, no minimum wage, no safety standards, no protections for who you are. Every standard we build, HR programs around today was hard won by labor organizers, by legislators, by workers who refused to accept that things couldn't be better and by employers who wanted a better workplace and pushed so they wouldn't be alone. HR didn't create the floor, but we are the standards of it.

That's something worth remembering on the 250th birthday of this country. We're going to be talking about the presidents, the ones who built the workplace, and sometimes, yeah, the ones who tried to tear it down. But that's what the heck is happening in HR and HR in America. I'm Kelly Rexrode.

Happy 250th America. Subscribe and come back and hear the rest of this special trilogy.