Comment by jjk166

It most certainly was the case. As you correctly point out, people were collecting such statistics at the time, we know how much they worked and they worked a lot. In London from 1750 to 1800 the average male laborer worked over 4000 hours per year, and the typical year had 307 workdays. We have records of employment that list who worked which days at particular businesses, and court cases where witnesses testified about their work schedules, and we know of complaints from people at this time about the excessive amount of time they worked.

Take the Philadelphia carpenters' strike in 1791, where they were on strike demanding a reduction in hours to a 60 hour work week. The strike was unsuccessful. In the 1820s there was a so called "10 Hour Day" labor movement in New York City (note that at this time people worked 6 days a week). In the 1840s mill workers in Massachusetts attempted to get the state legislature to intervene and reduce their 74 hour workweeks. This was also unsuccessful. Martin Van Buren signed an executive order limiting workdays for federal employees to 10 hours per day. The first enforceable labor law in the US came in 1874, which set a limit of 60 hours in a workweek for women in Massachusetts.