Imagine it's 1914. Henry Ford just created the factory assembly line, and his company's productivity has skyrocketed.
A car that took 12 1/2 hours to assemble now takes 1 1/2. He decides to double the pay and reduce the work day from nine hours to eight, and he later reduces the work week from six days to five.
The nation is shocked, his workers are thrilled, and his company thrives with increased productivity and loyalty.
Manufacturers around the country follow his lead, and it eventually becomes standard practice, and becomes a law in 1938. So how did Ford settle on 40 hours in a work week?
He adapted the idea from labor activists 100 years earlier, who thought that the average 70 hours a week in a factory were brutal and unsustainable.
They campaigned with the slogan, "Eight hours for labor, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will".
Eight hours also conveniently made three equal shifts to keep Ford's factory open 24 hours a day.
But Ford also believed that leisure time was indispensable to capitalism.
Working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles, he said.
As the work week shrank from 70 to 40 hours, economists predicted that the trend would continue, and Nixon suggested a four-day work week was right around the corner.
