Bunge’s successor, Ivan Vyshnegradsky, toned down many of Bunge’s reforms. He then bequeathed his successor, Count Witte, a bill making factory owners responsible for the death or injury of an employee. When the matter came up for discussion in the Imperial Council, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (see Chapter 8) argued against it, saying the law was ‘socialistic’. Witte explained in his memoirs that the Tsar ‘as a rule … refused to support me in my effort to organize a system of factory inspection … all the efforts to improve the lot of factory workers in Russia by legislative means were strenuously opposed by the reactionaries’.22
The reduction in working time was opposed not only by capitalists unable to see beyond their immediate interest, but also by influential ‘classical’ economists such as Nassau W. Senior, who argued (Letters on the Factory Act, 1837) that the whole of an entrepreneur’s profit was obtained in the last hour’s work and so in any shortening of the working day would be ‘destroyed’.23 Some industrialists were less retrograde, notably the great social reformer and ‘utopian’ socialist Robert Owen, who, in 1817, had coined the famous slogan: ‘Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest’. A few industrialists favoured a reduction of working time: some for philanthropic reasons; others because they were efficient and could compete better if a limit was imposed on their competitors’ ability to extract the last drop of production from their exhausted workers; others, afraid of the power of the newly enfranchised electorate, wanted to appease their workers.
Thus in England, William Mather, a Liberal MP and an industrialist, had written in 1892 that ‘Many of us who sat in the last parliament and did not support the Eight Hour Bill, had our majorities largely reduced solely in consequence of our opposition to it.’24 A year later he introduced the eight-hour day at his ironworks in Salford. In spite of this he was defeated at the 1895 general election (though he was returned in February 1900). In Germany, at the turn of the century the optical scientist Ernst Abbe, co-owner of the famous Zeiss plants in Jena, introduced the eight-hour day in his factory as well as other measures aimed at improving the lives of his workers.
There were economically rational reasons as to why some capitalists might be in favour of greater state regulation. If, because of strong trade unions, or for other reasons, an employer found himself having to make concessions or pay higher wages, it might be quite desirable that all sections of industry should be subjected to the same regulations, all the more so if his firm was more efficient than the competition. In any case the shorter working day was and is essential to the overall growth of the capitalist system, since it enhances consumption.
The international labour movement wanted a far shorter working day than the ten to twelve hours that prevailed in the nineteenth century. The First International had demanded the eight-hour day as early as 1866. Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, scorning ‘the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man”’, demanded a ‘modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day’.25 The Second International, convened in Paris at its founding congress in 1889, made the eight-hour day a key element of its programme. American trade unions advanced such demands throughout the 1870s and 1880s (the eight-hour day had been introduced for federal employees as early as 1868). In Great Britain in 1890 and 1891 the Trade Union Congresses passed resolutions in favour of the eight-hour day. In 1890, in London’s Hyde Park, a large demonstration (the organizers claimed 250,000 participants) marched in favour of it. One of the organizers was Will Thorne, the leader of the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers, which had won the eight-hour day the previous year. The more moderate trade unionists joined in out of fear of losing touch with their rank and file. As the Liberal MP George Howell put it, ‘Goaded by the attacks of the Socialists and New Trade Unionists, the London Trades Council found itself obliged to participate in May Day celebrations in favour of … the Eight Hours and other idealist proposals.’26
The historian Gary Cross explained that the eight-hour day was a much more radical measure than the ten-hour limit advanced by earlier reformers. While ten hours was believed to be the norm, the eight-hour movement was more ‘revolutionary’ because it aimed to set a universal standard, regardless of productivity, age, and conditions.27 Sidney Webb, in a Fabian pamphlet, declared that workers increasingly realised that:
it is only by shortening their working day that they can share in the benefits of the civilization they have toiled to create. They have been educated; but their work leaves them no time to read. They have been given the vote; but they have no time to think.28
In Britain, Conservatives were just as likely as Liberals (sometimes more likely) to be in favour of legislation against sweated industries, low wages, and long hours, some even suggesting state interference in raising wages.29 In fact, ‘Between 1903 and 1910 the Conservative party became increasingly receptive to the idea of developing a distinctive policy on social reform.’30 They were in favour of a vast increase in employment and promoted tariff reforms (i.e. protectionism) on the grounds that it would increase employment and protect jobs – with the slogan ‘tariff reform means work for all’.31
The ‘labour question’ became increasingly central: novels proliferated denouncing the conditions of the working class. Here, for obvious reasons, British novelists had been first, with Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) about conditions in the textile industry; Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855); Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849); and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839) and Hard Times (1854). In France, Yves Guyot, radical journalist and politician, for twenty years editor-in-chief of the pro-laissez-faire Journal des économistes, ferociously anti-socialist, pro-Dreyfus, feminist, and anticlerical, wrote a novel in 1882, La famille Pichot, subtitled Scènes de l’enfer social, denouncing conditions in the mining industry and depicting the owners in lurid terms (wearing gold-rimmed monocles, cigar-smoking, only concerned about profits and not about the lives of 150 miners trapped down the pit, etc.).32 None of this is surprising: Émile Zola would do the same in Germinal (1885) with far superior flair and talent but espousing a not dissimilar ideology. There were non-fiction books denouncing the conditions of workers, such as Georges Picot’s Les Moyens d’améliorer la condition de l’ouvrier (1891) and Jules Huret’s Enquête sur la question sociale en Europe (1892–7, see Chapter 2 above). In the United States the most celebrated and influential example of this genre of novels was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), first serialized in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. In 1907, Jack London published a dystopian novel, The Iron Heel, in which America is ruled by large corporations run by an oligarchy (the ‘Iron Heel’), which has destroyed all small businesses and set worker against worker. Well before Upton Sinclair and Jack London, there was a spate of books and pamphlets about the negative consequences of industrialization, such as Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), as well as novels about tramps (usually perceived as dangerous outcasts), such as Horatio Alger’s Tony the Tramp (1876), George M. Baker’s A Tight Squeeze (1879), and Lee Harris’s The Man Who Tramps (1878).33 In Germany, Wilhelm Raabe’s ecologically anti-capitalist novel, Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft (Pfister’s Mill: Notes from a Summer Vacation, 1884), tells the story of how a new factory pollutes the stream on which the mill owned by the jovial and likeable Pfister stands, kills the flora and fauna, and makes the air unhealthy.34
There was plenty of evidence that extremely long hours were an important factor in accidents. In France in 1909, 2,395 individuals were killed at work and 434,000 were injured.35 During an investigation in France in 1872 into a train accident caused by the driver falling asleep, it was discovered that the man had been working for thirty-eight consecutive hours.36 The public was increasingly alarmed. Mutual societies, originally created to help unemployed railwaymen or their widows and orphans, soon turned into pressure groups lobbying for an improvement in the conditions of the railwaymen. One, created in 1883, even had as its ho
norary president a public intellectual of the stature of Victor Hugo.37 In Capital, Karl Marx reported the frequency of newspaper reports about railway catastrophes with headlines such as ‘Fearful and Fatal Accidents’ and ‘Appalling Tragedies’. Reynolds’ Newspaper of 4 February 1866 reported ‘as a very frequent occurrence’ a driver who commenced work on the Monday morning at a very early hour, and, ‘When he had finished what is called a day’s work, he had been on duty 14 hours 50 minutes. Before he had time to get his tea, he was again called on for duty … The next time he finished he had been on duty 14 hours 25 minutes, making a total of 29 hours 15 minutes without intermission.’38 There was considerable sympathy for railway workers, especially for the driver, who was regarded as a heroic figure (though not in Zola’s La bête humaine, 1890), the first to die in the frequent accidents of the period, solitary – unlike other workers – and carrying some of the aura that airline pilots would later have.39
In Berlin the social Christian academic Adolf Wagner, shocked by the squalor of the working class (for which he blamed, among others, the Jews), declared in October 1871 that ‘The system of free competition which permits work to be treated as a commodity and wages as the price for it, is not merely un-Christian, it is inhuman in the worst sense of the word.’ He insisted on the need for ethical considerations in human affairs and state intervention in the economy.40
Eventually, throughout Europe, labour legislation was promulgated during a period of crisis (1873–96) that also coincided with the increased strength of trade unions and the growing enfranchisement of male workers. In Australia and New Zealand the eight-hour day had already been introduced in the late nineteenth century, but only in some trades. Australians had to wait until the 1920s; New Zealand never introduced a nation-wide law.
In most countries, across industries, there was little uniformity in working hours. For instance, in Italy and Canada people worked longer hours in textiles, mining, and services.41 There was also a significant difference between countries. Thus, in 1913, Americans, Italians, and Dutch workers worked more hours a year (over 2,900 hours) than anywhere else. Australians worked the least (2,214 hours) and far less than the French.42 This disproportion has endured today even in ‘advanced’ countries. In 2000, each American still worked longer than anyone elsewhere in the Western world (1,879 hours), while the Dutch, who worked so hard in 1890, could now relax with ‘only’ 1,347 hours a year. But there was also considerable convergence. In 1870, Britons worked less than other Europeans, the Belgians more, but by 1913 the Scandinavians and other Western countries had caught up.43
The eight-hour day is an achievement of the twentieth century. In most cases it was introduced immediately after the First World War: November 1917 in Russia, 1918 in Germany, Poland, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, and Austria; 1919 in Denmark, Hungary, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Sweden, and Holland. The workers’ unrest of the immediate post-war period and the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia were a crucial factor in the widespread adoption of this long-fought-for measure.
In Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States there was no country-wide legislation on the eight-hour day. In those countries, powerful trade unions achieved the eight-hour day in their own industry but did not put pressure on government for national legislation. The lack of state intervention in the social question, they felt, would be an added incentive for people to join unions and organize – which is why the eight-hour day was not made compulsory in the UK.
Class conciliation was advanced as a justification for labour reforms by British Conservatives such as Lord Shaftesbury, who, as Lord Ashley, introduced the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, which banned the employment of women and young children in mines, and the Ten Hours Act (Factories Act, 1847), which restricted the hours of women and children. Karl Marx, in his inaugural address to the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, attributed this achievement to the ‘admirable perseverance’ of the English working classes, but forgot to mention Shaftesbury.
In 1874, after six years in opposition, Benjamin Disraeli and the Conservative Party introduced a new Factory Act (1874), which raised the minimum working age to nine and limited the working day for women and young people to ten hours in the textile industry, and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act (1875), which decriminalized picketing (thus strengthening the Molestation of Workmen Act, 1859) and the Employers and Workmen Act (1875), which enabled workers to sue employers in the civil courts if they broke legal contracts. In fact, the Conservative government elected in 1874 managed to pack eleven major pieces of social legislation into three years, more than any government until the Liberal government of 1906.44 This legislation seemed to have granted the trade unions everything they had wanted and which Gladstone’s ministry had refused them. In October 1875 the TUC even carried a motion of thanks to the (Tory) Home Secretary by a large majority. And the Conservatives, in turn, could tell industrialists that they had disposed of a major source of social conflict. On 29 June 1875, Disraeli wrote to Lady Bradford, ‘We have settled the long and vexatious contest between capital and labour’ and, on the same day, to Lady Chesterfield (Lady Bradford’s sister), ‘This … will gain and retain for the Tories the lasting affection of the working classes.’45 (From 1873 until his death in 1881, Disraeli wrote some 1,600 letters to the two sisters.)
In fact, Victorian Britain, contrary to the stereotype of laissez-faire Britain so beloved by historically unaware modern neo-liberals, had the most interventionist government in the world. Its list of Acts of Parliament reforming labour relations included: the Railway Acts of 1842 and 1844, which set up a system of inquiries into accidents and which gave the government the right to fix fares and freight charges; the Mines Act of 1842, which restricted the employment of women and children underground; the Coal Mines Inspection Act of 1850, which established health and safety in the mines, against opposition from coal-mine owners, many of whom sat in the Lords. Then there were numerous Factory Acts (1833, 1844, 1847, 1850, 1856, 1870, 1871) regulating working hours for women and children, all consolidated with the Factory and Workshop Act (1878), described by A. V. Dicey as the ‘most notable achievement of English socialism’.46
The 1876 Merchant Shipping Act prevented ship owners from sending unsafe ships to sea. The 1878 Factory and Workshop Act established that all workshops and factories employing more than fifty people should be inspected regularly by government inspectors rather than by local authorities (as previously). The 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act compelled an employer to compensate an employee injured at work, and his dependants if he was killed at work.47 Finally, when it came to legislating between employers and workers, the turning points were the Trade Union Act of 1871 (when Gladstone was Prime Minister), which made trade unions legal, and that of 1875 (when Disraeli was Prime Minister), which made strikes legal.
All in all these measures were as significant a legislative revolution as the establishment and development of the welfare state between 1906 and 1910 and after 1945. As John Morley wrote in his famous Life of Richard Cobden, published in 1881, summarizing the voluminous social legislation of the previous decades: ‘we find the rather amazing result that in the country where socialism has been less talked about than any other country in Europe, its principles have been most extensively applied’.48 For liberals like Dicey the key factors in advancing such reforms were the moderation of the ruling classes and of trade union leaders. In his words the era of the ‘despotic authority of individualism’ had come to an end and Britain became increasingly ‘socialist or collectivist’.49
Trade union strength was not directly related to that of socialist parties. Unions could be strong, as in Britain and, to a lesser extent, in the United States, where there was no strong socialist party. But unions, per se, do not challenge capitalism at all. Their task was (and is) to modify the distribution of the gains from capitalism. To the extent that they were successful in obtaining better conditions and higher wages fo
r their members, they raised costs for firms. But raising costs is also a way of weeding out inefficient firms – part of the ‘creative destruction’ that drives capitalism. Increasing wages was also a way of expanding the size of the market. Poorly paid workers could not be good consumers. Producing with cheap workers and selling to well-paid ones is the ideal situation from the point of view of the entrepreneurs, but it is not something one can plan. The view that the pursuit of individual interests works in favour of the general welfare of capitalism is an act of faith and/or propaganda held by over-enthusiastic and naive supporters of free markets. Paying workers more than the going rate is an excellent business decision if one intends to steal workers from other employers because one’s prospects are buoyant and to keep them loyal (it is, incidentally, the justification for paying footballers and bankers munificent sums, a justification far more valid for the former than for the latter).
Collective bargaining was established by the last decades of the nineteenth century at the local if not yet at the national level. It became the norm in the United Kingdom and Switzerland; it was occasionally used in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Denmark, and, to a lesser extent, in the Netherlands, Catalonia, and Norway. Elsewhere it barely existed. In Japan, for instance, before 1895 there were hardly any unions. A socialist party was founded in 1906, well after most European socialist parties. It was banned the following year, after heavy repression and the accusation that it was seeking to murder the Emperor.50 It was not until 1926 that collective bargaining was accepted.51 Even in the decades after 1945 trade unions in Japan remained weak when compared to those in the West. Yet, everywhere unions grew in strength. As early as 1870, Britain had a higher trade union membership (in relative terms) than any other country.52
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