a fair day's work

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an amount of labour that is proportionate, reasonable, and appropriately matched to the compensation received, expressing the principle of equivalence between effort and reward that underlies the concept of fair exchange in employment relationships; often paired with the phrase a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, which became a central demand of the labour movement in the nineteenth century, asserting workers' right to wages sufficient to live on in exchange for a reasonable and bounded amount of effort; the phrase appeals to a normative standard of balanced reciprocity in employment that both sides of the employment relationship can invoke to assess whether the terms of their arrangement are just