Worktime Between Haymarket and the Popular Front: An International Perspective

Abstract

The quest for an eight-hour day was the central issue of the struggles leading to the Haymarket massacre of 1886. It also was at the heart of a widening scope of labor activity in the 1880s. The AFL's call for national eight-hour demonstrations on May 1, 1890 encouraged admiring European labor movements to join the Americans in an international strike for eight hours, the event which partially inspired the organizing of the Second International. Given these often-noted facts, it is ironic that the history of the hours issue after 1890, and especially between World War I and the popular front, when the major reductions in worktime occurred, has been largely neglected by American and European labor historians. In the half-century between Haymarket and the popular front worktime particularly dominated the attention of international labor and produced the forty-hour week standard and the ideal of the annual vacation. Movements for shorter working hours epitomize the essentially discontinuous character of labor history. The quest for reduced work time has been most pronounced during peak periods in labor organizing. These movements also capped epochs of political or class-wide mobilization during brief periods of democratization following wars and depressions when the legitimacy of the political economy was challenged. Not only did the period after the American Civil War and the years following World War I and II produce hour movements, so also did the depressions of the 1840s, 1880s and 1930s in affected countries. The demand for fewer hours also became an increasingly international phenomenon. Agitation for a shorter work week was pronounced during the following periods: 1847-50 in Britain, France, and slightly later in Australia; 1866-73 in the USA and Britain; 1886-91 in the USA and virtually all of industrializing Western Europe; and more narrowly, 1897-1907 in Britain, France, and the USA. These movements culminated in the period, 1915-22 when not only American, Australian, and European movements for shorter hours were widespread but Latin America also shared in this worldwide effort to reduce worktime. Although this international quest for short hours became fragmented in the 1920s, the call for the forty-hour week (or less) animated both the French and American labor movements in the popular front period. At the same time, the movement for annual vacations brought legislation and collective bargaining in France, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. 1 With some exaggeration one could argue that short-hour drives were syn