"the eight-hour instead of the 12-hour day"
The evil Henry Ford of the greedy Ford Motor Co. gave us the 8 hour day. He needed to run his factory 24 hours a day to keep up to demand, so he instituted 3, 8 hour shifts.
The liberal solution would have been to put the government in charge of who could buy a car in short supply and put a huge tax on it.
I will say the government workers are right now stealthily working on a 4 day 32 hour work week for us, for the same "pay" of course, or so they think. They way it works is they sign up for a 4 day 10 hour day work schedule on the pretext of reducing their overall time spent commuting, then leave work 15 minutes after the 8 hour day workers leave. I work in San Francisco and Friday's are fast becoming ghost town days.