Well, it sort of depends on how / where you see yourself and whether you work for yourself. Doctors today work long hours, and teachers are sort of limited by c

Well, it sort of depends on how / where you see yourself and whether you work for yourself. Doctors today work long hours, and teachers are sort of limited by class schedules so their labor organizing has generally focused on better pay / benefits rather than fewer hours, but even for engineers, there's a spectrum from locomotive engineer to Nikola Tesla. Here are some things I've learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States and linked pages : - In 1791, carpenters in Philadelphia went on strike against "the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week" and fought for a 10-hour day. http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html - The International Typographical Union, which had relatively well-off members, went on strike around 1900-ish initially for a 48-hour work week and then for a 40-hour work week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Un... - In 1907, the US passed the "Hours of Service Act," which limited railroad telegraphers to a 9-hour day. In committee the act was almost going to be a limit to a 12-hour day (i.e., the normal day was longer than that!), until the telegraphers spammed their congresspeople using their telegraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers#Impact_of_Hours_of_Service_Act_of_1907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers... I would say that software engineers, SREs, etc. working IC jobs maintaining large codebases/services at the direction of their bosses in large companies are far closer to the professions that historically have made up the labor movement—carpenters and typesetters and electricians and actors and journalists and composers and telegraph operators and so forth—than they are to the doctor running their own private clinic as their own business.