Many impatient workers didn’t wait for a law. In December, the union of ship caulkers (workers who sealed ships watertight) struck and became the first granted the new hours. Other maritime unions quickly achieved the same goal in the early part of 1866, some by walking off the job, others through simpler negotiations with their employers.

In February, the state assembly passed a version of the eight-hour bill and sent it to the state senate. Kenaday presented a twenty-two-foot-long petition with 11,000 signatures supporting the eight-hour day to the senate. But after vocal opposition from the iron trades’ employers association, the bill was narrowly defeated. Kenaday later sent the petition on to the California delegation to the U.S. Congress, when it was considering an eight-hour bill for federal workers. That law passed in June 1868.

Despite the show of strength, only a few thousand workers were employed under eight-hour contracts, out of 60,000 in the city. Employers formed a ten-hour league society in response to the workers’ movement. Ship employers, starting with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, fired employees who had been working eight hours and advertised back east for replacement workers. A compromise was reached when the fired workers were allowed to return at eight hours per day but with a slight cut in pay.

Momentum grew until the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law establishing the eight-hour day in all city and county employment. Finally in February 1868 an eight-hour-day law for all California workers was passed by the state assembly and state senate, and signed by the governor. A huge torchlight procession in San Francisco celebrated passage of the law, the second statewide eight-hour law in the country (after Illinois the previous year). Far from perfect—the law lacked effective enforcement mechanisms—it nonetheless marked a high-water point for the struggle for a shorter workday.

More than a century after the deaths of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, and Mark Hopkins, their continuing presence in the state remains impressive. Their names are still memorialized on cities, streets, banks, hotels, libraries, parks, beaches, schools, and universities. They had failed at gold mining, succeeded in retail businesses supplying miners, and converted their modest storekeeping fortunes into the seed money for the Central Pacific. Yet, how accurate is it to describe them, as standard histories do, as “the men who built the railroad” across the Sierras?

In June 1867, several thousand Chinese workers had had enough. They went on strike near Cisco, proclaiming “Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen.” They wanted forty dollars a month, up from thirty. The Central Pacific, perhaps unwilling to imagine its “pets” might think for themselves, told the newspapers that the strike must have been the result of agitation by Union Pacific representatives. The company wanted to maintain the public impression that it treated its workers well and that only external meddling might have induced the workers to take such drastic action. When the laborers refused a Central Pacific offer to raise their wages to thirty-five dollars, the company surrounded their camps with armed guards, choking off food supplies. After a week, the workers were forced to return to their jobs with no improvements in hours or pay. Nonetheless, an interesting event had occurred: the largest job action yet seen in California and by a group of workers believed to be strike-proof.