The other day I rewatched John Carpenter’s They Live — which, for the record, is a pretty good satire of Reagan-era America, and deserves to be remembered for more than just that stupid Shepard Fairey sticker campaign. While watching, I noticed something pretty great that I missed the first time through. It shows up after the main character puts on magic sunglasses, which allow him to see that the billboards around him actually contain secret brainwashing messages. Most of these just say things like “consume” and “obey.” But check out the sign in the upper left corner of this picture:

That command, of course, is a riff on an old slogan of the nineteenth century labor movement, which demanded the eight-hour day using signs like this one:

As David Roediger and Philip Foner remark in their great history of American labor and the working day: