WORK LESS Institute of Technology

THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY

Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, has posted a proposal, and call for comments on his Unite to Win blog. Sandwichman has submitted the following comment:

Just over a century ago, when the modern labour movement was being born, the eight-hour day was the rallying cry. There's a good reason for this. As the final report of a 1902 US Senate Industrial Commission concluded,

On the side of the working population there can be no question respecting the desirability of fewer hours, from every standpoint. They gain not only in health, but also in intelligence, morality, temperance, and preparation for citizenship... A reduction of hours is the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure...

This echoed what the Congress of the International Working Men's Association had declared in 1866:

The limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive.

One thing that strikes me about the decline of union destiny in the US is that it has corresponded with the arrest and then reversal of the long-term historical trend of reducing the hours of work. At the time of the AFL and CIO merger, the four-day workweek was clearly on the national agenda, as evidenced by press coverage in the late 1950s of the proposed responses to automation. By the mid-1960s, shorter working time had faded from view.

There are a number of reasons for the shelving of shorter work time demands. One of them, paradoxically, was success in achieving earlier goals. The eight-hour day and the weekend came to be seen as "normal" rather than as the fruit of long and intense struggle. And the came to be seen as the final destination rather than markers along the way in what should have been an unending struggle for shorter working time.

Another obstacle to continuing the struggle for shorter work time, frankly, comes from internal conflicts of interest in the labour movement. Organizations themselves benefit more from higher wages and the associated dues than they do from shorter work time. Many members of unions have always seen the overtime premium as a way to make more income rather than as a way of discouraging employers from using overtime rather than hiring new workers.

A third obstacle has come from the perenniel opposition of employers to reduced working time. In contract negotiations, employers are usually more willing to compromise on wage and benefit demands than on working time. And employers' public relations war against shorter working time has been intense, enduring and effective. One outpost of that effectiveness is that a strawman claim, the so-called lump-of-labour fallacy, is treated as gospel by mainstream economists.

Finally, as a researcher on this issue for nearly ten years, it seems to me that unions in North America have not devoted the policy research resources necessary to fully understand the intricacies of the issue of shorter working time. The creation of jobs by reducing the hours of work isn't a "simple sum in arithmethic" but neither is it wishful thinking. But there are many tax, productivity and motivational complications that need to be understood to build a winning strategy.

I would like to close by seconding what Bill Callahan from Cleveland said about the need for unions to invest in the broader community "beyond the bargaining unit." The movement for the eight-hour day in the late 19th century and early 20th century was a broad community movement, with important legal and political aspects beyond being a union bargaining issue.

Posted by sandwichman at November 10, 2004 12:43 PM