The jobs site Indeed reported in 2021 that 61 percent of remote workers and 53 percent of on-site workers found it more difficult to “unplug” from work during off hours than before the pandemic began. Nearly 40 percent of all workers said they check emails outside of regular work hours every day. Derek Thompson made a compelling case in The Atlantic that despite all the talk of “quiet quitting,” it’s mostly a fad and a fake idea, the kind of thing the very online latch onto to have something to talk about. Worker productivity has not really decreased. Yet Thompson also says that the neologism is a stand-in for more essential “chronic labor issues, such as the underrepresentation of unions or a profound American pressure to be careerist.”

When a careerist culture meets a digital revolution that allows unlimited access to work, something’s got to give. And in America, that something tends not to be work demands but is instead the human soul. The rise of digital technology requires us, as a culture, to re-examine what it means for work to be humane. As we do so, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us in the labor movement. They offer us a model for how to begin this re-examination.

The Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries birthed the labor movement, which attempted to curb the excesses of capitalism and new technology. There was a time when hunter-gatherers and then farmers worked only as much as they needed to survive, which, according to a report by NPR, was often less than 40 hours a week. With the introduction of factories, work hours grew longer and less flexible. The labor movement fought to change both culture and policy to limit our work weeks, and the 40-hour week eventually became a norm. What’s clear is that people didn’t suddenly become lazy and want to work less. Instead, a change in technology created a new way of work that demanded a response. We find ourselves facing this again with today’s digital revolution.

In the early labor movement, a broad and diverse base of religious people found common cause around Sabbath laws. These laws (often called blue laws) are now usually seen as examples of antiquated, puritanical, even theocratic impulses: prim religious people running around trying to make sure no one enjoys a beer on a Sunday afternoon. Advocates of Sabbatarianism, however, saw their work as an act of resistance to greed and a fight for the laborer.

When Philip Schaff, a 19th-century Swiss German theologian, immigrated to the United States, he was impressed by the ability of ideologically disparate religious groups to collaborate politically to solve social ills. For Schaff and many others, a key issue in the burgeoning industrialist economy of the North was the preservation of time for worship, rest and family life to preserve the dignity of the worker. They looked to Sabbath laws, in part, to help achieve this. Schaff stressed that keeping the Sabbath wasn’t merely a religious observance but served a civic function. It was a practical way, through time itself, to treat workers as valuable humans with whole lives to be lived.