By Sam Slade

I've been working on this case for the last 20-plus years. Word on the street was that the 8-hour day died back in the early 70s. I was hired to find out. No one wanted to believe it, we all grew up figuring it would live forever.

Not all of us really worked the 8-hour day, of course. The farm fields are still filled with weathered hulks of humanity forced to bust their butts for what seems like an eternity. For them the 8-hour day never died because it was never born to begin with.

Some of us were lucky enough to win an 8-hour day. We could even raise a family on it. But that was years ago. Personal income's been falling ever since that B-movie actor stole our hearts, and the White House.

The phone rang. It split my head like a rusty knife, cutting through the gin fog that I fell asleep in. The clock said 4 a.m. The phone said it was the cops. They'd found what I was looking for. When I got there, the body was smeared on the floor. It was dressed in what looked like a pile of dirty laundry. Its head was mashed like a potato and blood, black as crank case oil, flowed from it like an Exxon slick.

The coroner's boys said it had been bludgeoned by chronic unemployment, beaten by part-time jobs, and flattened by working two, maybe three jobs just to make ends meet. The ends never met.

The 8-hour day is dead. Some still struggle to revive it. They refuse to be locked up in a prison of sweat just to fatten some boss with a dollar sign for a face. Thankfully, my work day is over. I've got a date with a girl named gin.

©Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons