“Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work.” Exodus 20:9-10

Earlier this week on Monday we celebrated a holiday called “Labor Day.” We tend to celebrate it as the last big fling of summer with cook-outs, trips to the lake, etc. Labor Day was created in the early 1900s to allow workers a day off from their labors as an honor for their efforts. In 1940, the revised Fair Labor Standards Act established the 40-hour workweek. Any work above 40 hours was classified as overtime and required a higher rate of pay.

Yet some successful businessmen, organizations, and governments feel we need to be logging more of our 168 weekly hours at work. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (China’s version of Amazon), “is a big fan of extreme overwork” and recently praised the “996” schedule. Those numbers stand for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days per week. Ma, the richest man in China, called the 12-hour workday a “blessing.” Even the state-run media railed against Ma’s blog about work and called the 996 “unfair and impractical.” Tesla’s Elon Musk claims “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.”

Uber used to rally behind the slogan, “work smarter, harder, and longer,” and WeWork uses its co-working spaces to post the phrase, “don’t stop when you’re tired; stop when you’re done.”

There is sufficient research that shows that people who work more than 55 hours a week “perform worse than those who go home at a normal hour and rest.” Work was God’s gift to man before the Fall, but the curse of sin has altered work and our understanding of it ever since.

Bro. Larry

* Quotes referenced in Newsweek.