Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/40

 20 fifteen hours a day. They bethought them—so they reasoned—that they had been for a long time paying for short hours to their neighbours, and that their neighbours ought now to pay for short hours to them; they resolved to have their day reduced first to ten hours, and then, after a few months, they resolved again to have it reduced to eight, and though far from being a powerful trade—for they are scattered in very small shops employing only two to four hands each, so that in a strike their places are easily filled—they succeeded in securing this great reduction of their working day, and what is not a little remarkable, in securing it without putting a farthing on the price of the loaf, without losing a sixpence of wages, and without providing room for more than half the unemployed bakers in the city. Their victory made an impression on the other trades, and the movement spread. In obtaining that victory they owed much to the support given them by the powerful organization of the combined eight-hour trades, but they owed nothing to any change of law or any rise of wages. Their wages, indeed, were very low at the time—only 25s. to 35s. a week in 1883, as compared with 40s. to 42s. in 1881, or 50s. in 1885. Nothing had changed in their circumstances, but only in their will to have what they saw other working men have; and that change was caused, as changes of opinion very commonly are, by the publication of facts which excited discussion among them, and awakened their ambition to obtain the social advantages which others of their own class had long been enjoying. Possibly a new and better educated generation had risen, but anyhow, they came to set a value on the short day they had not set before, and to feel it to be for them, what it already was for so many of their friends, an essential of existence. One more section of the working class had added the short day to their standard of life, to the sum of comforts which the opinions and habits of their class make daily necessaries of being; and the sentiment passed on from trade to trade, and stopped only when it reached those which are largely affected by the opinion and habits of women. The principal branches of industry in which long hours still prevail in Melbourne are those in which women are largely employed—the tailor trade in which two-thirds of the hands are women, and the textile factories, like the wool mills, for example, in which there are three women employed for every four men, or the rope and jute works, in which there are three women for every two men. Some of the clothing factories run only eight hours a day, but then they usually give out work to their tailoresses to be done at home after factory hours, or they have a number of out-workers, who work any hours