Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/43

 Rh The masons at Melbourne University began to moot the subject in February; the building trades had their first public meeting about it on the 21st of March, and they wrought their first eight hours day on the 21st of April. But in 1859 the situation had changed. The decline of the gold-fields had left a great redundancy of labour in the colony. Relief works were started in Melbourne as far back as April, 1858, and before the end of that year one-third of the masons of Victoria were out of employment; many of the carpenters were taking sub-contracts, from which they made no more than 6s. a day after working ten or eleven hours. At last one of the largest employers of labour, the contractor for the new State railway—who, by the way, had shortly before quoted with approval an observation made to him in a private letter from John Bright, which I think is worth repeating here, because Mr. Bright is so usually supposed to have been an opponent of short hours: 'If you ever suffer the ten hours system to rear its head in Victoria again, you are unworthy of the name of men'—this very contractor now seized the opportunity to enforce simultaneously a reduction of wages and an extension of hours. The men said they would take any reduction of wages the state of the labour market required; but in the words of Mr. Don, their parliamentary champion, 'as to the eight hours question, they had nailed their colours to the mast, and if they were shot away, they would fight for the holes left by the shot.' There is no need to relate the history of the struggle which followed, one of the most skilful as well as hard working men have ever conducted; but after being four months out on strike they succeeded, as men with that spirit must needs have done, in preserving their short day, and it has never been threatened since.

The coachbuilders, on the other hand, who had obtained the eight hours day in 1856, a little later than the building trades, lost it again in this year 1859, because, working under cover, they did not set the same store by short hours as the masons and bricklayers, and preferred to keep their wages up by returning to the ten hours day. When their hours were reduced to eight, their employers began to pay them by the piece instead of by the day, and, finding they did not earn so much in the eight hours as they used to do in the ten, many of the men had already repented of the change, and as Mr. Healey, the Postmaster-General of the colony, and himself a coachbuilder, stated in the Legislative Assembly, they had, many of them, long since been praying for the ten hours system again. Consequently, when the contractor for the carriages of the new State railway restored the ten hours system in his