Chapter XI: State Socialism (5)

The international compulsory eight hours day is attended with like difficulty. The eight hours day is no necessary plank of socialism, though socialists have at present united to demand it. Rodbertus, the most learned and scientific of modern socialists, always contended that the normal working-day ought not to be of uniform length, but should vary inversely with the relative strain of the several trades, and Mr. Bellamy, under his system of absolute equality of income, makes differences in the hours of labour answer the purpose of regulating the choice of occupation, and preventing too many persons running into the easier trades, and too few into the harder. Nor, indeed, apart from the element of universal compulsion, has the eight hours day anything of socialism in it at all. In some trades it is probably a simple necessity for protecting the workpeople in normal conditions of health; but above all its sanitary benefits it would confer upon the workpeople of every trade alike the much grander blessing of admitting them to a reasonable share of the intellectual, social, domestic, religious, and political life of their time. If the State could bestow upon them this sovereign blessing without forcing them to accept a reduction of wages, which might deprive them of things even more essential for their elevation, and which would only breed among them an intolerable discontent, by all means let the State declare the glad decree. But experience shows that in matters of this kind the State--and especially the democratic State--is a very limited agent, and cannot successfully enforce its decrees upon unwilling trades. In certain special cases, when the short day is demanded for the purpose of averting admitted dangers to health, as with the miners, or for the safety of the public, as with the railway service, there is a recognised stringency of obligation which is exceptional; but in the great run of trades the question is virtually one of mere preference between an hour's leisure and an hour's pay, and in these circumstances a law has too little moral authority behind it to be practically enforceable by penalties in the absence of decided working-class opinion in its favour in the affected trades. In Victoria more than fifty separate trades have obtained the eight hours day without any parliamentary assistance, and almost the only remaining trades which do not yet enjoy it are the very trades which have been protected by an eight hours Factory Act since 1874. As soon as the Act was passed, the operatives, men and women both, petitioned the Chief Secretary for its suspension, and it has remained in suspended animation to this day. A democratic government cannot risk incurring the discontent of a body of the people merely to prevent them from working an hour more when they want to earn a little more. California has had an Eight Hours Act on the statute-book for even a longer period, but it has remained a mere dead letter, because employers began to pay wages by the hour or the piece, and the men found they did not earn so much in the short day as they used to earn in the long. The same thing has happened in others of the American States, and the friends of the eight hours movement in that country are beginning to think that the reason their long and often hot struggle has hitherto been so fruitless is because they have been wasting their strength in political agitation when they ought to have been cultivating and organizing opinion among the working class themselves trade by trade. The weakness of statutory eight hours movements has generally flowed from two sources. One is that what their promoters really wanted was not shorter hours, but more wages. Numbers of them sought only to shorten regular time in order to lengthen overtime, and numbers more got themselves persuaded that a general reduction of hours was the grand means of effecting a general rise of wages, either by removing the competition of the unemployed, or in some other way; and it has often been only the few--always the very _elite_ of labour--who fought for the eight hours day because they valued the leisure enough to make, if necessary, some little sacrifice for so noble a boon. When, therefore, wages, instead of rising, begin to get reduced, general disappointment is inevitable, and they get reduced--and reduced lower than they otherwise might be--through the second weakness of such movements, which is simply this, that a trades union which is not strong enough to get an eight hours day by their own unaided efforts, without the assistance of the law, is not strong enough to prevent their wages from sinking, and in this matter the law can do nothing to help them. The eight hours day can only be an abiding possession if it come through the successive growth of opinion and organization in one trade after another. The history of the movement in Victoria is the history of such successive triumphs of opinion and organization; as soon as a trade has come to want the eight hours day earnestly enough to be willing to sacrifice something for it, the trade has always got it. In the result they have had to sacrifice very little; scarce one of them suffered a fall of wages by the change, for the simple reason that there was no serious fall in their daily production. The difference between the ten hours day and the eight hours day in Victoria was not two hours, but only three-quarters of an hour, for--at least in the important trades--the old day was ten hours, with an hour and a quarter off for meals; and in eight hours with only one break the men probably did near as much as they did before in the eight hours and three-quarters with a double break. Still, most of the trades took twenty or five-and-twenty years before they ventured to join the movement; and though no country in the world is so much under the control of working-class opinion as Victoria, the proposal of a general legal eight hours day which has repeatedly come before the Legislature has never been carried into law.

In one sense the eight hours day is the least socialistic of all reforms proposed in the interest of the working class, for it is impossible to make the other classes of society pay for the boon. It may not, perhaps, be quite certain that there will be anything to pay for it at all, for many people assure us production will suffer nothing by the change, and some promise us it will be even increased. But one thing at least is certain: if there is anything to pay, it is the working classes themselves who in the end will and must pay it. The reduction can make no great difference to employers, except on running contracts, or where for any reason they refuse to keep their plant in use by an extra shift, for in the matter of wages they will do under an eight hours system exactly what they do now--pay the men for the amount of work they get out of them and no more; and as they thus produce their goods at the old cost, they can export them at the old price. It need not, therefore, have any permanent effect worth speaking of on the general trade of the country. But if the men do less, their wages will be less too,[10] and nothing can long keep them what they were. This wages question is the eight hours question; and while it is a question for the men more than for the masters, it is essential they should keep clear of all misconception in deciding it.

There is no way of getting ten hours' pay for eight hours' work except by doing the work of ten hours in the eight. An Eight Hours Act would give working men no new power to raise the rate of wages; and if they cannot by combination get twelve hours' pay for ten hours' work to-day, they cannot by combination get ten hours' pay for eight hours' work to-morrow. It is, indeed, a very current delusion, that a restriction of production must increase wages by necessitating the employment of the unemployed, whose competition tends at present to prevent wages from rising. But that effect could only occur if the same demand for commodities remained, and although that might be the case if the restriction were confined to a single branch of industry, while all the rest continued to produce as much as before, it would not be so if the restriction were carried out simultaneously all round. The various trades are one another's customers; the commodities one supplies constitute the demand for the labour of the others; and if the supply is reduced all round, the demand will be reduced all round. To say there is at any moment a fixed amount of work that has to be done whatever the produce of the labour, is, as Professor Marshall very happily observes, to set up a Work Fund Dogma exactly analogous to the old Wages Fund Doctrine of the schools, and, he might have added, a dogma even more dangerous to the prosperity of the working-man. Yet the idea is abroad; it appears in the trade-union policy of "making work"--that is, making work for to-morrow by not doing it to-day; it is a kind of mercantilist delusion of the present century, by which each trade is to cut some advantage for itself out of the sides of the others until they all come to practise the trick in turn and fall to mysterious ruin together.

If the eight hours day is to raise wages, it will not be by limiting production, but by improving it. That the productivity of labour is capable of improving--nay, that it is certain to improve to such an extent as to earn by-and-by more wages in an eight hours day than it now does in a ten--is scarce matter of doubt. Apart from the influence of machinery and invention, there is a great reserve of personal efficiency, especially in English labour, still capable of development. Mr. Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, said that he noticed when watching his men at work, that most of them spent at least two-thirds of their time, not in working, but in criticising their work with the square and the straight-edge, which the few dexterous workmen among them almost never required to use. An increase of dexterity might, therefore, make up for a reduction of the day in these trades even to four hours. But the present question is about the probable effect of the reduction itself upon the efficiency of labour, and experience certainly does not justify those who declare that it would increase the daily product. The effect of a reduction from ten hours or nine to eight is, of course, an entirely different question from the effect of a reduction from twelve or thirteen to ten, because the last two hours' labour in a very long and exhausting day may bear little comparison with the last two hours of a shorter day; and of the exact effect of the particular reduction from ten to eight we possess but scanty evidence, though much might easily be obtained, one would think, from establishments that run, as many do, ten hours in summer and eight hours in winter, or ten hours in busy times and eight hours in slack. We have some American evidence of this sort, but it is very contradictory, a few employers saying that quite as much work was done in the eight hours as in the ten, and others that as much would have been done had the men made a better use of their leisure, while several more complained that the men really did less, and that their energies were positively slackened under the short hours--this also perhaps being a result of the use they made of their leisure. In Victoria the production seems to have been reduced a little, but really so little as to have no very perceptible results, and the leisure is used so well that the working class have made a distinct rise in the scale of being, and have developed a remarkable love of outdoor sports, and spare energy enough to produce some of the most famous cricketers and scullers in the world. There are some trades in which it is possible for production to diminish and yet wages to remain the same, because the difference can be thrown into the price of the product. These are trades supplying a commodity in general and necessary demand of which the consumers will stand a very considerable rise in the price before they will seriously shorten their purchases. Coal is a good example of such a commodity, and the miners are therefore very happily situated for the adoption of an eight hours day. They are more able than most other trades to prevent such a measure from resulting in any fall of wages, and consequently a legal enactment on the subject is less likely with them to create subsequent disappointment, and remain dead letter. They need State help in the matter less than most trades, for they are strong and well organized; but an Eight Hours Act would be more easily enforced among them. Very few trades, however, are in this exceptional position. On the whole, the risk of material loss incurred by the reduction is slight compared with the certainty and greatness of the moral gain; the material loss will, in any case, be soon made up by industrial improvements, if things progress as they are doing; and if the reduction is more likely to come through the union and organization of the trades themselves rather than by either national or international action, the trades at least need have no serious fear to make the venture.

The idea of settling questions of this kind by international action, which was started at first from the side of the employers as a convenient obstructive, but has since been taken up with great zeal by the young German Emperor and the socialists, is obviously delusive. It ignores the possibilities of the case, for who, in the first place, is to adjust the complicated details of this international handicap, and if they were adjusted, who is to enforce them? No country is likely to be very strict in enforcing those parts of the settlement by which it lost some point of advantage, and those are the only parts for which any such settlement was wanted at all. Besides, international labour treaties are quite unnecessary. Experience all over the world shows that a short-hour State suffers nothing in the competition with a long-hour State. When Massachusetts became a ten-hour State, her manufacturers never found themselves at any disadvantage in competing with those of the neighbouring eleven-hour States of New England, and they would have still less to fear from rivals who employed, not the same Anglo-Saxon labour as they did themselves, but the less efficient labour of Germany or France. The ten-hour day was its own reward. It improved the efficiency of the workpeople to the degree where, in concert with improvements in the management, also due to the shortening of the day, the product of ten hours in Massachusetts was equal to the product of eleven elsewhere. If the same result were to follow the adoption of an eight hours day, which, however, has still to be tested by experiment, there is of course no more reason why one country should wait for another in adopting the eight hours day than in adopting the policy of free trade.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] It is only fair to this eminent man to remember that his mature opinions must not be looked for in his essay, "Ideen zu einem Versuch die Graenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen," which was written in his early youth, and never published until after its author's death. Although in this work he condemns all State education, he lived to be a famous Minister of Education himself, and to take a great part in establishing the Prussian system of public instruction.

[8] Frothingham's "W. H. Channing: a Memoir," p. 18.

[9] Roscher's "Finanz-Wissenschaft," p. 63.

[10] For proof of the position that the rate of wages is determined by the amount of production, see pp. 307-11.