Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/57

 Rh It is, I think, beyond question that the shortening of the day to eight hours has improved the efficiency of the labour during the time employed both as to quantity and quality, and there is every probability that in some trades and some particular kinds of work this cause alone would lead to as much being done in the short day as the long one. The smallness of the sum awarded in 1857 to the contractor for the Houses of Parliament in Melbourne as compensation for the loss he sustained through the shortening of the day, shows that in the building trades the change made very little difference. I cannot say how many men were employed on that building, but the job was a large one, over £400,000. The vote to which the compensation was appended as a supplementary vote was for £20,000, but this supplementary vote for eight months' loss was only £1,800, or the wages of ten men at 15s. a day. Apparently, therefore, he needed only ten new hands, so that the work done by the old ones cannot have been very substantially diminished. Mr. James Stephen, the originator of the movement in Melbourne, is said to have ascertained by practical experiment in his brick-making works, that the men did quite as much in eight hours as they used to do in the ten. In some trades, e.g. the confectioners, the prices of their wares were very slightly raised at the time of the reduction of the day in order to meet the extra expenditure on labour the change entailed. The bakers said they would have had to put a half-penny on the four-pound loaf if wheat had not fallen at the time a shilling a bushel. But in the building trades, while there was no change in their wages between 1856 and 1859, the commodity they produce had actually cheapened, and the fall of house-rents was one of the pleas on which their wages were reduced in the latter year. It is true that all prices were falling in Victoria at the time, but had there been any very sensible difference in the amount of the individual artizan's daily production, it would have withstood the general downward tendency.

Moreover, it ought to be remembered that the actual change in the length of the day is not so great as it seems on the face of it to be. The difference between the ten hours day and the eight hours day in Victoria is not two hours, but only three-quarters of an hour. This is distinctly stated by Mr. J. A. Aldwell in an essay on the subject which won the prize offered by the Australian Eight Hours League in 1856. 'It has been broadly asserted,' says he, 'that the success of the eight hours movement would entail a loss of two hours per day to employers. After a stricter examination this statement will not be found