1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Hours of Labour

HOURS OF LABOUR.—The decade following 1910 witnessed a rapid advance and extension in the already widespread movement in favour of the reduction of the hours of labour. This was mainly due, apart from general trade-union pressure, firstly to the repercussions of the World War and of experience of industry under war conditions, and, secondly, to the international recognition of the principle of the 8-hour day in the Treaty of Peace of Versailles as one of the &ldquo;principles. . . well fitted to guide the policy of the League of Nations.&rdquo;

Until the outbreak of the World War the movement in favour of the reduction of hours, and particularly in favour of the 8-hour day, had gone forward but only slowly and spasmodically. International conferences of workers passed the ordinary resolutions demanding the 8-hour day, as did the International Socialist Conference of 1910, the International Textile Workers' Conference in 1911 and the eighth Congress of Trade Union Secretaries in 1913. In 1912 the International Association for Labour Legislation asked for a 56-hour week for glass-workers, an 8-hour day for the iron and steel trades, for workers in paper and pulp mills and in the manufacture of chemicals. In the following year the Miners' International Congress demanded the day of eight hours &ldquo;bank to bank.&rdquo; The official delegates of the Berne Conference in 1913 contented themselves with a proposal to limit the hours of child workers to 10 daily—a proposal which the International Association for Labour Legislation adopted in 1918, with the suggestion that part of the working day should be devoted to trade education. The Berne Conference further suggested a 10-hour day for women workers.

The comparatively moderate nature of the majority of these pre-war proposals—and indeed of certain later ones, such as that of the Congress of Inter-Allied Trade Unions at Leeds in 1916, which asked for the 10-hour day, and that of the International Trade Union Congress held at Berne in 1917, which demanded that the daily maximum should be gradually reduced to 8 hours—would hardly have prepared the student of these matters for the very striking advances which became operative in the chief industrial countries between the Armistice and 1921. The advance is also to be noted in recent expressions of trade union opinion, in the movement for the 7- and even for the 6-hour day in coal-mining, and in such pronouncements as that of so influential an employer as Lord Leverhulme in England, who in 1918 himself advocated the 6-hour day on economic grounds.

The outbreak of war had been followed in all the belligerent countries by the suspension of all limitations upon the hours of labour worked in industries of importance in the conduct of the .war, whether these limitations arose from agreements with the trade unions, from legislation or from custom. In all cases the general course of events was the same. After some difficulty, varying in degree with the imminence of the threat to national safety and with the strength of trade unionism, the workers consented, were persuaded by tempting rates of wages, or were coerced to lengthen the working day. In all cases, after the experience of a period of excessively long hours, it was found that the returns from overtaxed labour rapidly diminished, and in all cases limitations were sooner or later re-imposed, not, however, reducing

hours to the pre-war standards, but calculated to yield the highest return in output from the personnel available.

War experience would thus seem to have effectively killed the long-lived notion that output in industry varies directly with the number of hours worked. The argument in favour of the shorter working day was indeed formidably (and perhaps unexpectedly in certain quarters) strengthened by the scientific investigation of hours in relation to output, which was undertaken, by Great Britain and America in particular, in the height of the desperate struggle to produce adequate supplies of munitions of war. The results of the British investigations, published in the various reports of the Health of Munition Workers Committee (appointed by the Ministry of Munitions in Sept. 1915) and of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, were of the highest scientific value, and these, corroborated by the evidence of American, French and German experience, and themselves corroborating much of the argument of certain investigators whose work had been done before the war, undoubtedly were an important factor in determining the attitude of mind which is reflected in the above quoted &ldquo;principle&rdquo; enshrined in the Treaty of Peace.

War experience did, in point of fact, supply the scientific basis which the general propaganda, carried on for so long by the organizations of workers in all industrial countries in favour of the reduction of hours, had lacked. Such scientific data as existed had been provided or interpreted for the most part by writers on so-called &ldquo;scientific management&rdquo; who were concerned primarily with questions of output. Governmental investigations had to consider output in relation to the labour available, and were led inevitably to considerations of the health of workers and even of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. In other words, whilst previous investigations were, rightly or wrongly, suspected by workers generally to be directed by motives which, if not hostile, tended at least to a certain neglect of the workers' side of the case, the war investigations were much more widely accepted as being a fair attempt at an adequate study of the question of hours in relation not only to output but also to the effect on the worker.

It need only be added here that the general result of those investigations was that a reduction of hours was not incompatible with an increase in output, arising from the improved health of the worker and his increased capacity for effort during the shorter hours worked.

The war, however, was responsible for another and perhaps even more effective factor in the eventual restriction of hours. The repercussions of the successive Russian revolutions were everywhere felt and everywhere dreaded. It became a commonplace of polemic on the subject of improved conditions of labour that such improved conditions (including the reduction of the hours of labour) were the alternative to Bolshevism. Thus scientific experience, fear of revolutionary movements and the normal liberalism of the nations successful in the war were united in support of a general reduction in the hours of labour at the moment of relief and optimism which succeeded, in the later months of 1918, the long and oppressive years of warfare.

The results of this combination are to be found in the rapid extension of legal restrictions upon the hours of labour which took place in many of the belligerent countries immediately upon (or even before) the Armistice of Nov. 1918, and in the inclusion in the treaties of peace of the &ldquo;Labour Part&rdquo; (Part XIII. in the Treaty of Versailles) which creates machinery for international legislation upon labour conditions, and which recognizes the 8-hour day as an end to be pursued by international action.

In the middle of 1921 signs were indeed not lacking that a characteristic of the next few years might be a reaction in this connexion. Hopes of rapid recovery to the economic position of pre-war days had been disappointed, and there was a manifest tendency to place part of the blame for this upon the reduced hours of labour. It can only be noted here that this reaction seemed likely to result in a check to the movement for a further reduction in hours of labour.

National legislation for the limitation of the hours of labour has taken various forms. In some cases, e.g. France, Spain,

Portugal, acts or decrees have prescribed a general limitation for all workers, or for all workers in large groups of occupations such as &ldquo;industry,&rdquo; or &ldquo;commerce,&rdquo; whilst the detailed application has been left to be elaborated by administrative decrees or orders. Usually these decrees are issued after consultation with the organized workers and employers concerned, and they appear to result in a considerable elasticity in the application of the law. In other cases (e.g. Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Belgium) the act itself is made to apply to a detailed list of industries, and the exceptions are usually indicated. Again, as in the case of Great Britain (Coal Mines Act) a special Act may regulate the hours worked in a particular industry.

Another group of legislative measures deals with the hours of labour of specified classes of workers, women and children and men, engaged in hazardous occupations. In Great Britain the Factory Acts have attempted to regulate the hours of women and children, who were regarded as being less favourably situated for &ldquo;free bargaining&rdquo; than men, but it was not until 1908 that legal restrictions were placed upon the working hours of the latter, and then only in the case of a single industry, coal-mining, which was of a peculiarly difficult and laborious nature.

A third type of legislation secures the aim of limiting hours of labour by indirect means. In the Commonwealth of Australia, for example, and in its constituent states, the Arbitration Laws provide for the settlement of disputes in labour matters (including disputes about the hours of labour) by a process of arbitration and the legal enforcement of arbitration awards. Again, in the case of Germany and some other countries, collective agreements arrived at voluntarily between employers and workers' organizations may under certain conditions be given the force of law.

There remains to be noted the huge mass of collective agreement upon hours of labour which, though not always possessing the force of law, does in fact regulate hours very successfully in many countries. This is notably the method adopted for most industries in Great Britain, but the practice is common even in countries where legislative limits are enforced. In these cases the collective agreement is usually an advance, from the workers' point of view, upon the provisions of the existing legislation.

The analysis, given later, of the position in 1921 in the more important industrial countries of the world will illustrate these methods of limitation.

.—The 8-hour day was established in the mining of coal, stratified ironstone, shale and fireclay by the Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1908, and the amending Act of 1919 further reduced the daily hours of underground workers, with certain exceptions, to seven. Article 1 of the Act provided for a future reduction in certain eventualities to six hours daily. Other legislative restrictions of hours are to be found in the Factory and Workshop Consolidation Act of 1901, the Shops Act of 1912, and the Employment and Closing Order Act of the same year. A bill was introduced in Aug. 1919 for the establishment of the 8-hour day in industry, and clauses were proposed to be added extending its scope to cover also maritime employment and agriculture, but it went no further in 1921.

In the United Kingdom legislation has played a comparatively unimportant part in the restriction of hours except in the cases of women and children. Before the war a large number of collective agreements had been made, and after the war these were widely extended. The spheres now (1921) covered by agreements

the working week to 48 hours or less are best indicated by an enumeration of the cases in which a longer week is still worked.

(H. A. G.*)

.—In the United States regulations of hours worked in industry are made by state or Federal legislation or by agreement between employer and trade union. When trade unions fix the length of the working day, they mean the basic workday, with a higher rate of pay for overtime. The theory of the basic workday is that extra pay for overtime acts as a tax on the employer to induce him to introduce a shorter actual workday. In the week ending Dec. 13 1919, for the entire state of New York, 35.76% of telephone operators worked from 3 to 6 hours overtime, 35.02% worked 6 to 9 hours overtime.

According to the census of 1910, of the 6,615,046 wage-earners enumerated in manufacturing enterprises, 7.9% worked 48 hours or less a week, 30.6% worked 54 hours or less, 60.7% worked more than 54 hours but not more than 60 hours, and 8% worked more than 60 hours. The census shows that 114,118 or 1.7% worked where the prevailing hours were more than 72 a week. These figures, which do not include agriculture, building, mining, domestic and personal service, show the number of hours normally worked by the majority of workers in the establishments enumerated. Of the 86 principal manufacturing industries employing more than 10,000 wage-earners in 1909, 20 employed over 10% of their workers more than 60 hours a week.

Among railway employees continuous service for long hours has been very common. Records of the Interstate Commerce

Commission show that during the year ending June 30 1913, 261,332 railway men were reported as on duty for periods exceeding the legal limit of 16 hours, and that over 33,000 of them worked more than 21 hours continuously. In 1914, of the 7,000,000 wage-earners enumerated in manufacture in the United States, 11.8% worked 48 hours a week or less, 51% worked 54 hours or less a week, 43.1% worked more than 54 hours but not more than 60 hours, and 5.8 % worked more than 60 hours. The number working more than 72 hours was 0.8%. The number working the 8-hour day or less was 833,330, chiefly in the building trades.

Hours of Work in U.S. in 1919.

(From investigations of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

(J. R. Co.)

Demands for international agreement or legislation on the standardizing of the hours of labour have been frequent since 1890, when the International Conference on Labour in Factories and Mines—the Conference summoned officially by the then German Emperor—suggested a general adoption of the 8-hour day in mines. The need for uniformity in hours in order to remove at least one awkward cause of friction in international relations was voiced in 1893 at Zurich by the Metal Workers' Congress, and again in 1904 at Amsterdam. In 1894 it was the turn of the Tobacco Workers; in 1905 of the International Conference of Trade Union Secretaries. At Geneva in 1906, and again at Zurich in 1912 the International Association for Labour Legislation emphasized the same point. In 1916 the General Federation of Trade Unions of Great Britain, and in 1918 the United States Socialist party adopted resolutions on the subject. Steps were taken in the same direction by the Scandinavian and Inter-Allied Conferences of 1918.

This movement culminated in the inclusion of the international labour agreement (see ) in the Peace Treaty of Versailles. The Labour part of the Treaty was drafted by an International Commission on Labour Legislation, appointed by the Peace Conference on Jan. 31 1919. Its chairman, Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, submitted a declaration of the aims of labour, which included the following clause:&mdash;

Various national delegations proposed amendments in the terms, but finally certain &ldquo;principles&rdquo; were adopted by the Commission, including the following:&mdash;

The Peace Conference approved of these general principles in its plenary sitting of April 28 1919. An International Organizing Committee, representative of the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Belgium and Switzerland, appointed to prepare for the first session of the International Labour Conference created by the Labour part of the Treaty, placed first upon the Agenda for that Conference the question: &ldquo;Application of principle of the eight hours' day and of the forty-eight hours' week.&rdquo;

Working Hours in Industry.—On May 10 1919 the Organizing Committee issued to the Governments of all the States which were named in the Annexe to the Covenant of the League of Nations a questionnaire, the object of which was, firstly, to secure information as to how far the 8-hour day was already observed, whether as a result of legal enactment, collective agreement, or custom; and as to the immediate intentions (if any) of the various Governments in the matter; and secondly, to elicit by categorical questions the attitude of the Governments towards the proposed limitation of the working day to 8 hours and the working week to 48.

Thirty-five Governments replied to the questionnaire. To the categorical question: &ldquo;Is the Government prepared to adopt the limit of eight hours a day exclusive of rest-time?&rdquo; not one Government returned a definitely negative reply. The Government of Siam did not contemplate legislative action &ldquo;in the

present circumstances.&rdquo; In the United States and Canada the distribution of legislative power between the central and state or provincial authorities made a direct reply difficult if not impossible. The Japanese Government doubted the possibility of the immediate application in Japan of the 8-hour day, in view of the relatively unadvanced state of most of her industries and the inexperience of her workers. Similar considerations were argued by India and by Greece. Every other State replying to the questionnaire indicated its readiness to adopt the 8 and 48-hour limits. Many of them indicated that these limits (or lower ones, as in the case of Poland, which had a 46-hour week) were already enforced within their territories.

The list of these States comprised every Power of industrial importance, with the exception of Russia, Finland and the ex-enemy States, and included Argentina, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Great Britain, Guatemala, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Panama, Peru, Rumania, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Uruguay, in addition to those mentioned above.

Of the States which were not consulted or which did not reply, it was known at the time that Finland, Germany, German-Austria and Russia had already taken action by law.

This evidence pointed clearly to the possibility of the successful conclusion of an International Convention on the subject; and the Organizing Committee proceeded at once to the drafting of a project to be submitted for the consideration of the Conference. The basis of this project was the adoption of the 48-hour week rather than the 8-hour day, the Committee giving as its reason for this, that &ldquo;it allows more elasticity in the arrangement of the hours of work, and it facilitates the adoption of a half-holiday, or even a whole holiday, on Saturday or some other day of the week, by enabling a longer period than 8 hours to be worked on other days. Secondly, it helps to secure the weekly rest-day, whereas the principle of an 8-hour day by itself does not.&rdquo; The greater part of the project was concerned with the limitations within which exceptions to the general rule should be permitted. It was clearly undesirable to leave unlimited scope for exceptions. &ldquo;The mere affirmation of the principle of a 48-hour week, while leaving a wide discretion to each State to allow such exceptions as it considers desirable in the circumstances of its country, would not, so it seems to the Committee, fulfil the purpose for which the International Labour Organization has been created.&rdquo; Since one of the motives of such a convention, as indeed of all international labour legislation, is the removal so far as possible of such sources of international friction as those which arise from the competition of &ldquo;cheap&rdquo; labour, or of labour suffering under relatively disadvantageous conditions, the Committee was obviously adopting the proper attitude in this respect.

The discussions of the International Labour Conference, which met at Washington in Oct.-Nov. 1919, turned for the most part on the permissible exceptions. To the general principle little or no opposition was offered. The Organizing Committee's project was, after some preliminary discussion, referred to a Commission of the Conference, and a Special Countries Commission was entrusted with the task of considering the application of this and other projects to tropical lands and countries displaying unusual conditions.

The Commission on Hours amended the draft in several particulars, and clauses were added to meet the special cases of Japan (a 57-hour week); British India (a 60-hour week, with a clause indicating that further limitation of hours is to be considered at a future session of the Conference); China, Persia and Siam (consideration at a future session); Greece (postponement of the date at which the provisions of the Convention should come into operation for two years in the case of certain industries, three years in the case of others); and Rumania (postponement for three years).

The Organizing Committee's omission of a provision for the establishment of the 8-hour day was not upheld by the Conference, which approved, in the final draft, the wording:&mdash;

The draft Convention came before the Conference for its final vote on Nov. 28 1919 and secured the two-thirds majority which is necessary for the formal adoption of a draft Convention.

The authentic text of the draft Convention was communicated to the Governments of all States Members of the International Labour Organization by the Secretary-General of the League of Nations on Jan. 15 1920.

Since a large number of the industrial States had already adopted, by legal enactment, or otherwise, the 8-hour day, it might have been expected that the ratification of the draft Convention would be rapid and practically universal. But this was not the case. Up to Aug. 1921 two countries only, Greece and Rumania, had ratified. Some countries (e.g. Great Britain and Switzerland) had definitely declined to ratify.

In the first place, certain difficulties arose as to the interpretation of those articles of the Treaty which govern the action to be taken by States in connection with the draft Convention. Article 405 of the Treaty of Peace provided that &ldquo;Each of the members undertakes that it will, within the period of one year at most from the closing of the session of the Conference, or if it is impossible owing to exceptional circumstances to do so within the period of one year, then at the earliest practicable moment, and in no case later than eighteen months from the closing of the session of the Conference, bring the recommendation or draft Convention before the authority or authorities within whose competence the matter lies, for the enactment of legislation or other action.&rdquo; The wording of the last sentence has given rise to certain hesitation, but the bulk of the States members have construed &ldquo;the authority or authorities within whose competence the matter lies&rdquo; to mean their respective Parliaments, and have submitted the draft Convention together with the Governmental proposals for action upon it, to those bodies. In Great Britain the difficulty arose from the fact that Article 405 provides also that draft Conventions be submitted &ldquo;for ratification by the Members.&rdquo; It was contended that the ratifying authority in Great Britain is the Crown, and that the Government was therefore under no obligation to submit a draft Convention for the consideration of Parliament unless legislative action in pursuance of the provisions of the draft Convention was contemplated.

Secondly, difficulties arose in connexion with the actual procedure of ratification. The Treaty provides an apparently simple formula:&mdash;

But this procedure was, in certain cases, found to fit awkwardly into the complicated framework of the older diplomatic practice. France considered it necessary to sign with Belgium a convention embodying the terms of the draft Convention on hours, and to add a protocol which was left open for the signature of other States. France and Belgium may thus in some sort be said to have ratified the Hours Convention, though they did not complete the procedure laid down in the Treaty. But the act of France and Belgium led to some misgiving on the part of other states members of the organization, who naturally asked whether these two countries would consider themselves bound not only in respect of one another and of any other countries which might adhere to the Franco-Belgian convention by signing the open protocol, but also in respect of other States which might ratify the Washington Convention by the procedure indicated.

Thirdly, the exceptions provided for in the text of the Hours Convention did not appear to meet the circumstances of all countries. Thus, Switzerland, which had adopted the 8-hour day on its railways and in certain branches of industry, and which, in its reply to the Organizing Committee's questionnaire, stated that &ldquo;The Government prefers the 48-hour week system and is prepared to adopt this limit in factories,&rdquo; declared itself unable to ratify the Hours Convention, principally on the ground that it considered its application to the small trades and undertakings

of the rural and mountain districts to be undesirable. Again, Sweden, whose Government was &ldquo;prepared to adopt both limitations (i.e., the 8-hour day and 48-hour week) at the same time,&rdquo; was faced by similar difficulties. The British Government was &ldquo;prepared to adopt the limit of 48 hours a week exclusive of rest-time.&rdquo; In Great Britain the 8-hour day and 48-hour week (or less) are all but universal. Yet the Minister of Labour declared that the Government was unable to ratify because of existing collective agreements governing the working of the railways, which permit overtime in certain cases which are not provided for in the Convention. The same or similar circumstances delayed or prevented ratification by Denmark, Holland, Norway and possibly other States.

Other factors making for non-ratification were the disturbed economic state of post-war Europe, and a reaction both in Government circles and in public opinion, as to the wisdom of shorter hours of labour in view of the need for greater production. The failure of the Russian revolutionaries to establish a satisfactory social system, the crushing of the attempts of their sympathizers in Hungary and Germany, and the failure of great strike movements in France, Great Britain and elsewhere, had moderated the fears of revolutionary action which were a factor in the creation of the International Labour Organization in 1919.

(H. A. G.*)