I listened to an interesting breakdown of the history of work. It told how records of medieval workers show workdays of 6 hours or less on most days, with 12 hour days only a thing when there's some urgency, such as harvest time. They also had a lot of holidays, and when labor became more valuable, they insisted on two days off a week.

This pattern changed when clocks became readily available. Some employers used clocks to regulate their workers strictly, and some fiddled with the time those clocks showed. Some even paid off the church to set early bell ringing times, to wake workers and to encourage them to go to bed early. Many industrialists noticed that workers lazed around on their days off, so they tried to limit what workers were allowed to do when not working!

In the past I have admired Gilbreth's time and motion studies, because they were useful to speed up accomplishment and reduce labor costs, improving efficiency. But now these same studies have been combined with constant surveillance to make some workplaces no better than prisons. When the boss spends all his time micromanaging employees, the workers should object, loudly.