Eight-hour day movement

Mandadas a Imprimir y Publicar por la majestad católica del rey Don Carlos II, nuestro señor.

Karl Marx saw it as of vital importance to the workers' health, writing in Das Kapital (1867): "By extending the working day, therefore, capitalist production...not only produces a deterioration of human labour power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labour power itself.

[10] The eight-hour day was the first topic discussed by the International Labour Organization which resulted in the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 ratified by 52 countries as of 2016.

Tata Steel was among the first Indian companies to provide various labour welfare benefits, such as eight-hour workdays since 1912, free medical care since 1915, school facilities for the children of employees since 1917, paid time off since 1920, formation of a provident fund and accident compensation in 1920, vocational training since 1921, maternity benefits since 1928, profit sharing bonuses since 1934, and retiring gratuity since 1937[11] In Iran in 1918, the work of reorganizing the trade unions began in earnest in Tehran during the closure of the Iranian constitutional parliament Majles.

In 1918, the newly organised union staged a 14-day strike and succeeded in reaching a collective agreement with employers to institute the eight-hours day, overtime pay, and medical care.

[15] In China, the first company to introduce the eight-hour working day was the Baocheng Cotton Mill in the port city of Tianjin (Chinese: 天津市寶成紗廠).

Its manager Wu Jingyi (Chinese: 吳鏡儀) announced on 16 February 1930 through Ta Kung Pao that his factory is starting the new 8-hour work schedule immediately.

The union representative Liu Dongjiang (Chinese: 劉東江) stated "Under the spirit of cooperation, laborers and factory owners work together to advance the business, and in turn to contribute to our nation's development."

After the successful Northern Expedition, the new Nanking government established the Bureau of Labor in 1928, followed by issuing the "Factory Law" in 1929 to set legal framework for the eight-hour working day.

[18] As a result of large-scale demonstrations and strikes in the late 19th and early 20th century, the former Czechoslovakia, now Czechia and Slovakia, introduced the eight-hour workday on 19 December 1918.

In 1884, Tom Mann joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and published a pamphlet calling for the working day to be limited to eight hours.

Mann formed an organisation, the Eight Hour League, which successfully pressured the Trades Union Congress to adopt the eight-hour day as a key goal.

The British Fabian socialist economist Sidney Webb and the scholar Harold Cox co-wrote a book supporting the "Eight Hours Movement" in Britain.

UK regulations now follow the EC Working Time Directive of 2003, but workers can voluntarily opt out[36] of the 48 hour limit.

[42] On 19 May 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a Proclamation directing that the wages of federal government "laborers, workmen, and mechanics" paid by the day could not be cut when their workday was reduced to 8 hours under the 1868 law.

In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers who went on strike at 1,200 factories, including 70,000 in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, and additional thousands in other cities.

The BTC, in return, established a union planing mill from which construction employers could obtain supplies – or face boycotts and sympathy strikes if they did not.

In return, the union agreed to refuse to work with material produced by non-union planing mills or those that paid less than the Bay Area employers.

On 5 January 1914 the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day (equivalent to $150 in 2023[44]) and cutting shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.

The eight-hour day might have been realized for many working people in the US in 1937, when what became the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first proposed under the New Deal.

Although opposed by employers, a two-week strike on the construction of Tooth's Brewery on Parramatta Road proved effective, and stonemasons won an eight-hour day by early March 1856, but with a reduction in wages to match.

Stonemasons working on Melbourne University organised to down tools on 21 April 1856 and march to Parliament House with other members of the building trade.

The government agreed that workers employed on public works should enjoy an eight-hour day with no loss of pay and stonemasons celebrated with a holiday and procession on Monday 12 May 1856, when about 700 people marched with 19 trades involved.

The initial success in Melbourne led to the decision to organise a movement, to actively spread the eight-hour idea, and secure the condition generally.

In 1903, veteran socialist Tom Mann spoke to a crowd of a thousand people at the unveiling of the Eight Hour Day monument, funded by public subscription, on the south side of Parliament House on Spring St.

The Eight Hour March, which began on 21 April 1856, continued each year until 1951 in Melbourne, when the conservative Victorian Trades Hall Council decided to forgo the tradition for the Moomba festival on the Labour Day weekend.

Promoted by carpenter Samuel Duncan Parnell as early as 1840, when he refused to work more than eight hours a day when erecting a store for merchant George Hunter.

A meeting of Wellington carpenters in October 1840 pledged "to maintain the eight-hour working day, and that anyone offending should be ducked into the harbour".

When the resident agent of the New Zealand Company, Captain Cargill, attempted to enforce a ten-hour day in January 1849 in Dunedin, he was unable to overcome the resistance of trades people under the leadership of house painter and plumber, Samuel Shaw.

Building trades in Auckland achieved the eight-hour day on 1 September 1857 after agitation led by Chartist painter, William Griffin.