Don't pink-slip the 40-hour week: workers unite! You have nothing to lose but your weekends.

TIRED AFTER A 12-HOUR DAY SEWING SHIRTS IN A steamy Lower East Side sweatshop? Trudging miserably to that Saturday shift picking Mr. Peabody's coal? You're not? You know why? Because for a century and a half, previous generations of American workers sacrificed their blood, sweat, and tears fighting for an eight-hour workday and a 40-hour workweek.

Unfortunately we modern laborers have been too busy watching television or the ebb and flow of our 401(k)'s to keep an eye on what had become a secular sacrosanct of American life--the punchclock-free weekend. In recent years, lax enforcement, a diminished union movement, mandatory overtime policies, and the almost unnoticed advent of the "at will" salaried worker have eroded the hard-earned sanctity of the 40-hour workweek. Several court decisions, a Bush administration attempt to reinterpret labor regulations that could cost millions of workers their overtime, and at least one piece of legislation further challenge hard-earned labor standards.

Once, getting a salaried appointment was a mark of distinction. These days it is often a legalistic ruse aimed at circumventing wage-hour laws by moving as many workers as possible into the "exempt" (from overtime) category of a salaried employee. Workweeks of 50, 60, or more hours without additional compensation are now not uncommon for entry-level, kinda-white-collar "managers" who may earn as little as $18K a year and who may actually have only themselves to manage.

But there is more at stake here than a humane workweek. What these workplace "innovations" really threaten is American family life. More time at work means less time at home. Parents working as "at will" employees have been fired after balking at 12-hour days or weekly schedules that extended past 45 hours. Ensuing wrongful termination suits against employers have fallen on deaf judicial ears.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that an "at will" employee could be fired for "any reason or no reason at all" unless such firing violated "clearly established" public policy, Unfortunately for salaried parents there is no clearly established policy that employers should "adjust [their] expectations based on ... an at-will employee's domestic circumstances." The message to parents? Beware or be unionized if you plan to participate in your children's actual childhoods.

Meanwhile the Family Time Flexibility Act is one of those neat-sounding pieces of legislation apparently churned out of the Office of Naming Bills for the Exact Opposite of What They Will Actually Accomplish. The act allows employers to offer workers the choice of time-off or time-and-a-half pay for overtime they put in.

The proposal has a family-friendly name, but critics say it is nothing more than a corporate wolf-in-sheep's-clothing, aimed at reducing workers' freedom and expanding their workweeks. Union leaders say the proposal will lead to pressure on employees to "choose" comp time instead of extra dough and that workers will not be able to take time off except as production schedules allow--not when they want to as the bill implies. In the end, the act would likely mean lower labor costs for businesses and less opportunity for working families to be together or to earn extra cash for the things they need.

HOW TO BALANCE WORK AND FAMILY LIFE HAS BEEN A CENtral concern of Catholic social teaching, which has taken great pains to spell out the moral responsibilities of both workers and employers. One of the primary ideas of this tradition is that human beings and their needs should be placed above the fist-changing, impersonal requirements of a modern economy. Efforts to "grow" workers' burdens without compensation or at the expense of family life turn this tradition on its head.

Innovation and flexibility are good things, but U.S. businesses ought to focus on true structural or technological advancements instead of innovating new ways to demoralize working people. American workers of the past sacrificed a lot, sometimes everything, to earn rights we take for granted now at our peril. Let's not spend the 21st century re-fighting 19th century battles. This Labor Day, let's preserve our free time for ourselves and our families.

KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.