20 Brutal Workplace Rules Employees Had To Follow In History

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford declared $5 a day for male assembly-line workers. But only around $2.34 of that was guaranteed base pay; the remaining $2.66 or so was a “profit-sharing” bonus. To receive that money, the worker had to pass inspection by Ford’s Sociological Department, whose agents conducted a full investigation of the applicant’s home cleanliness, bank account, drinking habits, and even boarders. These home visits stopped around the early 1920s.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many major U.S. airlines set strict weight restrictions on their “stewardesses.” They were expected to weigh between 105 and 135 pounds at heights of 5’2″ to 5’8″ or so. Weigh-ins were required before every flight, and if they failed, they would be sent home without pay. Airlines also dictated that flight attendants wear girdles.

In some places, like schools, banks, and insurance offices, in the 1920s to 1940s, there was a rule that single women had to resign when they got married. Some employers also wouldn’t hire women who were already married, supposedly because they were taking jobs away from men who had families to support. By 1940, more than half of female office workers were subject to these so-called marriage bars, while about 75 percent of school districts enforced them.

Prior to the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), there was no federal law requiring any minimum vesting schedule for private pensions. In other words, employers could require you to stay a certain number of years before the pension became yours to keep, and many required 20 to 30 years with one company. Get laid off after 18 or 19 years, and you forfeited all you had worked for. That’s why the demise of the Studebaker automobile factory in South Bend, Ind., in 1963 became a symbol of the need for change, after thousands of workers lost pensions they hadn’t yet fully earned.

Before 1932, many employers mandated that prospective employees sign what labor activists dubbed “yellow-dog contracts,” pledges never to become members of a union. Violate one, and you risked losing your job, being put on an employer blacklist, and getting sued for breach of contract. So much for simply signing your paperwork and starting on Monday. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 rendered these agreements unenforceable in federal court, which killed them as a practice across the country.

Prior to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, it was perfectly legal for an employer to simply terminate a pregnant employee. According to congressional testimony, 40 percent of employers did just that. Pregnancy itself could effectively become grounds for losing your job, with no federal law specifically protecting women from that discrimination.

Between the 1880s and 1930s, some small and relatively isolated coal, timber, and mining companies compensated their employees with private tokens, or paper scrip, rather than United States currency. The scrip was redeemable only for goods and services at the company’s own retail operation, where markups were often high. Should employees attempt to spend their scrip outside of the company store, local merchants would discount its value by anywhere between 10 and 30 percent. Your employer wasn’t just paying you; it could effectively decide where that pay was worth its full value. Reforms instituted under the New Deal, along with state legislation and unions, chipped away at the scrip system during the 1930s.

Before the Civil Rights Act’s Title VII in 1964, Jim Crow laws in the South mandated separate entrances, washrooms, and eating facilities for Black and white staff. Many employers throughout the United States did so voluntarily. Employers also had explicit dual pay scales and distinct promotion ladders. Regardless of qualifications, Black workers were limited to the lowest-paying occupations.

In the old days, newspapers published two separate columns, “Help Wanted – Male,” reserved for executive, technical, and trade jobs, and “Help Wanted – Female,” for mostly secretarial and retail employment. You could see which careers were supposedly meant for you before you even applied. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, yet the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission permitted such separate headers in 1965, then reversed course in 1968. Newspapers continued publishing sex-segregated listings, however, leading to further legal challenges. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s Pittsburgh Press ruling in 1973 that job ads were no longer permitted to segregate by sex.

In mid-century corporate handbooks, trousers for female office staff were not permitted and were seen as an act of insubordination, with women instead being told to wear skirts or dresses along with nylon stockings. It wasn’t legislation, just company dress code, but some offices continued to enforce this rule until the late 1960s and early 1970s. My work-from-home pajamas are looking increasingly rebellious by comparison.

In company towns, where your boss owned all the houses, your lease was directly linked to your employment. If you were on strike or fired suddenly, the company would bring in private detectives or local marshals and kick your family and their possessions out of the house and onto the street. There were major waves of evictions during the 1912 Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike, the 1914 Ludlow strike, and the 1920 Matewan confrontation, each of them coal mining labor struggle.

In the early 20th century, factory machinery and office equipment were made only for the right-handed. If you were left-handed at work, you had to make your body fit the tools anyway, raising strain and injury risk. Employers didn’t institute retraining programs to change the handedness of adults; schools often tried to train left-handed children to use their right hands instead.

During the 1940s and 1950s, official corporate conduct guidelines instructed female secretaries and office workers to don a formal hat and dress gloves during their commute, when meeting clients, and at lunchtime. Those gloves were expected to be removed when the women got to their desks. No such rule was mandated by law, but it was part of the proper office protocol.

Prior to 1978, some employers that allowed pregnant women to keep their jobs still required them to stop working months before their expected delivery. The leave was unpaid, and there was no guarantee of health insurance or even a job to return to afterward. In October 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which prohibited employers from treating pregnancy differently from other conditions affecting an employee’s ability to work.

Factories and typing pools in the early 20th century enforced strict no-talking policies to maintain productivity, and supervisors deducted wages for talking, singing, or humming at work. The telephone operators who worked for the Bell System were instructed to say nothing more than “Number, please,” and to sit upright and not talk to each other. Small talk at the office water cooler would’ve been an expensive habit.

In the 1910s to 1950s, industrial and mining companies made prospective employees take physical exams given by company doctors. Long before modern medical privacy protections, the doctors were told to share all information — prior injuries, illness, anything — with management. Management used that information to weed out accident-prone candidates and suspected union sympathizers

Between the 1830s and 1850s, the Lowell textile mills in Massachusetts used company-run boarding houses for their single female workers. There were strict rules, including 10:00 PM curfews and mandatory attendance at Sunday church services. Violate any of these rules, and you would be fired and blacklisted by all of the mills in the region. Your boss, in other words, could still have rules for you long after your shift ended.

During the heyday of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “Scientific Management” movement (roughly the 1890s to 1910s), which sought to maximize workplace efficiency, many plants docked 15 to 30 minutes of pay if you were one minute late punching your clock, or they would lock the gates at the whistle and send you home for the day. One minute could become a remarkably expensive minute. It wasn’t until 1938 that fairer rules regarding rounding were mandated by the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Following the public outcry over silent-film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s highly publicized 1921 scandal and trials, Universal Pictures issued the first standard morals clause for the entertainment industry that allowed the company to terminate any contract if an employee’s behavior elicited public “hatred, contempt, scorn, or ridicule.” Soon such clauses were widely inserted in corporate employment contracts, athletic organizations, and school contracts. Behavior outside work hours now carried a cost.

In the ’50s and ’60s, major airlines required female flight attendants to retire or transfer to nonflying jobs at 32 or 35. Yes, your 35th birthday could effectively double as a career deadline. Male pilots and stewards were free of that requirement. This wasn’t a Federal Aviation Administration safety regulation, but rather an airline personnel policy that didn’t come to an end until the advent of civil rights litigation against mandatory retirement based on sex.

This content was created with the help of AI.