My former employer (Guess why it's "former".): We're going to give you all a four day workweek!
All of us: YAY!
Former employer: With ten-hour work days. Put your affairs in order.

Of course, they didn't have access to modern amenities, but if so many of those modern amenities are supposed to be labor-saving devices that reduce or even eliminate much of that workload, why are we still working so many hours just to make ends meet ?

(I know, we've moved the ends farther apart ... but in the last 40 years it's been more because labor increasingly brings rewards for the capitalists, not the laborers.)

unlike modern laborers. Their life was no picnic but neither is 40-60 hrs. a week in the insecure gig economy.

Those who had their own land and functioned as 'subsistence farmers' with a 'cash crop' on the side, made it somehow.