Labor time

“ Given the quality of labor, the difference in its duration is the only property by which it can be distinguished. As labor-time, labor has the same standard of measurement as the natural time measures, viz., hours, days, weeks, etc. ”

“ Custom and national temperament affect the efficiency of labor by determining the normal period of labor time. After the bare necessities of life are provided for, the worker has a wide or narrow margin of productive energy to use as he pleases. If four hours' work a day would enable him to live, will he work longer or will he stop? The answer is determined by the balance of utility and disutility. Will additional hours of labor yield more gratification than idleness yields? ”

“ Your hour does produce more value. The labor-time that determines value is the [40] labor-time of the average, untrained worker. Again, you may waste your time, spending half of it looking out of the window or carrying on a flirtation. ”

“ As all work, men and women alike, and as machinery has been brought here to a wonderful degree of perfection, the actual labor necessary to maintain the people is, of necessity, very light. At first, a hundred or so years ago, in the early days of the community, the time of labor was fixed at five hours per day. But every decade, with the growth of the population, the labor hours have been diminishing. ”

“ Yet, it is not so very difficult, after all, to understand that the years devoted to learning his trade, by a mechanical engineer, for instance, during all of which years he must be provided with the necessities of life, must be reckoned somewhere and somehow; and that when they are so reckoned, his day's labor may be found to contain, concentrated, so to speak, an amount of labor time equivalent to two or even many days' simple unskilled labor time. ”

“ Fewer Hours of Labor than Formerly.—The hours of labor have been reduced everywhere. In the olden time labor was done by slaves or serfs, and neither their bodies nor their time was their own. They labored when, where, and as long as their masters dictated. Even a generation ago there was little said, and there was no uniformity, as to how long a working-man should labor. ”

“ If the hours of labor are ten to eleven a day now each shift could then have its hours reduced to eight. From that time on the industry would run daily six hours more and its machinery would be so much the better used, while at the same time the hours of labor for each laborer would be shortened by two hours. ”

“ They have seen that when the hours of labor were reduced the laborer was less rapidly worn out physically, that he could work more rapidly for a short time, and that his increased leisure and pay, if rationally used, made him a more intelligent and efficient worker. In other words, a reduction in the hours of labor from 15 a day to 12, to 10, and even in some cases to 8, was not attended by a parallel reduction in the output, but the latter remained about the same. ”

“ We can take it for granted that the production of each individual would not be decreased thereby as we have had countless examples showing that the advantages of the shortened labor time generally, at least, outweigh the disadvantages. ”

“ This ratio will be ascertained by taking the difficulty and danger of the labor into account and allowing them to reduce the time required for a given compensation. If a peasant in the open air can work seven or eight [Pg 30] hours a day, a miner ought not to work more than three or four hours. ”

“ So much has already been accomplished for the workingman that I have hope, and great hope, of the future. The hours of labor have been shortened, and materially shortened, in many countries. There was a time when men worked fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Now, generally, a day's work is not longer than ten hours, and the tendency is to still further decrease the hours.
By comparing long periods of time, we more clearly perceive the advance that has been made. In 1860, the average amount earned by the laboring men, workmen, mechanics, per year, was about two hundred and eighty-five dollars. ”

“ How many and how long the intervals of rest should be must depend on the nature of the work, on circumstances of time and place, and on the health and strength of the workmen. Those who work in mines and quarries, and extract coal, stone, and metals from the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in proportion as their labor is more severe and trying to health. Then, again, the season of the year should be taken into account; for not infrequently a kind of labor is easy at one time which at another is intolerable or exceedingly difficult. ”

“ I HARDLY know enough on the subject to give an opinion as to the time when eight hours are to become a day's work, but I am perfectly satisfied that eight hours will become a labor day.
The working people should be protected by law; if they are not, the capitalists will require just as many hours as human nature can bear. We have seen here in America street-car drivers working sixteen and seventeen hours a day. ”

“ The already-tired laborer has to toil an additional hour; his wife has to help in the fields as well as to suckle her infant; his children are still more scantily fed than they would otherwise be; and, beyond a decreased share of returns from increased labor, there is a diminished time and energy for such small enjoyments as the life, pitiable at the best, permits. ”

“ And that these possibilities are already recognized and accepted by not a few of the great body of workers, is proved by the fact that the greater the opportunity to work by the piece, and the greater the latitude afforded to workmen to control their own time in connection with earnings, the greater the disinclination to diminish the hours of labor. ”

“ There is no eight-hour nor ten-hour system of labor here; and I verily believe the industrial classes work the whole time, save when they pause to munch black bread, and to take three or four hours' sleep in the middle of the night; for as I trundle my way through the streets at five o'clock next morning, the same people I observed at various occupations in the bazaars are there now, as busily engaged as though they had been keeping it up all night; as also are workmen building a house ”

“ It is obvious that men or women working from ten to sixteen hours daily will have little strength or leisure for study, or activity in revolutionary work. It is also patent that wages are bound to be higher where men toil eight hours a day than where they work sixteen hours. It requires two shifts of men, working eight hours daily, to run a machine that one man runs sixteen hours. ”

“ The "long turn" of twenty-four hours and the "seven-day week" I have never heard defended, either in the mill by any foreman or workman, or outside by any member of the management, or even in a public statement. If, by an arrangement of extra workers, it were possible to eliminate these features and still keep the twelve-hour work-day for six days a week, there would, I think, be a certain number of men ready enough to work under that arrangement. I met one man, for example, who said: "Good job, [Pg 151] work all time, no spend, good job save." ”

“ When the workmen of the European Continent demand 'the three eights'—eight hours of work, eight hours of rest and refreshment, physical and mental, and eight hours of sleep—some of them are aware of the fact that this reform already exists in the Anglo-Saxon countries; but all are ignorant of this other fact that, during the Middle Ages, in an immense number of labor corporations and cities, a work-day was often only nine, eight and even seven hours long. ”

“ Under the competitive system, to earn this sum required, on the part of the adults and such of the children as were able to work, the continuous toil of three hundred days, twelve hours long—counting the possible workers of the family as three, and the labor day as twelve hours long—we have in the aggregate, say eleven thousand weary hours of this nerve depressing labor. A labor often performed in the midst of the most repulsive and unsanitary conditions ”

“ Turning now from theory to fact, we find that there has been a great improvement in the condition of labor in this respect. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the almost universal working day was, as McMaster tells us, from sun to sun. As factories grew up the habits of agricultural labor were carried over into industrial occupations, and working days of 16 and 18 hours were not uncommon. ”

“ We are not insisting, be it understood, on a four-hour or eight-hour system of labor. No industry or occupation will be hampered or meddled with by doing justice to the laborer in the way proposed. The railroad employee, printer, baker, factory hand, etc., can work on as now, but they must be compensated with just wages for the labor done. ”

“ Take the advance in quantity of products for ten years only, and by the aid of machinery, and more intelligent labor, we have gained more than two hours. Why should not labor get its due proportion? We are fast turning the drudgery of labor to pleasure. ”

“ Then if we imagine all the members of society to be workers, the exchange of equal quantities of hours of labor is only possible on condition that we understand beforehand the number of hours necessary to employ in material production. ”

“ All who can work do so for the general good, and working five hours daily causes a rate of production much in advance of consumption. The probability is that the hours of labor will have to be reduced to four, or even three. ”

“ A single person cannot carve a working day of more than, say 12 hours, out of the natural day, but 100 men co-operating extend the working day to 1,200 hours. The shortness of the time allowed for the work is compensated for by the large mass of labour thrown upon the field of production at the decisive moment. ”

“ Twenty-eight hours a week. Remember the new labor law the Earth government put into effect before we left? It proscribed a maximum work week of twenty-five hours for every man. We came here to escape restrictions, but we've saddled ourselves with more hours of manual labor than the least skilled laborer has to do on Earth. Firth! I'm not a manual laborer ”

“ With manual labor, as with intellectual labor, there is a maximum, after which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work drags along slowly and without vigor until the end of the forced daily labor. Consider also the beneficient suggestive influence of a reduction of hours, and you will readily understand why the recent English reports are so unanswerable on the excellent results, even from the capitalist point of view, of the Eight-Hour reform. ”

“ We wind up the spring of a clock, and, for a whole week, the labor thus stored up is slowly expended in keeping the clock going. Or, again, we spend five minutes of hard labor in raising the hammer of a pile driver, which, in its fall, exerts all that accumulated labor in a single instant. In these instances, we easily see that we store up labor. ”

“ But it is certainly not true that every limitation of the hours of labour must produce these consequences. And I am, I must say, surprised when I hear men of eminent ability and knowledge lay down the proposition that a diminution of the time of labour must be followed by diminution of the wages of labour, as a proposition universally true, as a proposition capable of being strictly demonstrated, as a proposition about which there can be no more doubt than about any theorem in Euclid. ”

“ The combined working day produces, relatively to an equal sum of isolated working-days, a greater quantity of use-values, and, consequently, diminishes the labour-time necessary for the production of a given useful effect. ”

“ We are of the opinion that a twelve-hour day of labor, followed continuously by any group of men for any considerable number of years means a decreasing of the efficiency and lessening of the vigor and virility of such men. ”

“ If the abbreviated time of eight hours per day for five days of the week, and four hours on Saturday, constitute a week's work, the laborer has more to pay for all of the necessities of life than he would have were full hours and a fair equivalent given for the wages he receives. ”

“ They knew very well that a reduction of two hours' labor given to the women and children would be sure to result in a reduction of the hours of labor of adult men. It is in the nature of the great industry that the hours of labor should be equal for all. ”

“ Interwoven with this acute problem is another which subdivision of labor has introduced into modern industrial occupations—the terrible fatigue which results from a monotonous repetition of the same process hour after hour, day after day, week after week. ”

“ Definite quantities of product, these quantities being determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are nothing more than the materialisation of so many Hours or so many days of social labour. ”

“ Modern machinery is throwing more and more men and women into the Army of the Unemployed. Shorter hours will employ more men and women, and will maintain and even increase wages, to say nothing of the tremendous development of the fighting spirit, the solidarity and class consciousness of the workers. ”

“ Skilled workers have often been able to form skilled labor monopolies, or unions, where their particular skill has been in demand, and have forced their employers to give them shorter hours, higher wages or better working conditions. ”

“ The labourer needs time for satisfying his intellectual and social wants, the extent and number of which are conditioned by the general state of social advancement. The variation of the working day fluctuates, therefore, within physical and social bounds. ”

“ Most of us have made the working hours of the day a burden to be borne merely for the sake of the wage that follows; the work itself is to us no more than a weariness. It is not necessary to examine here the economic causes of this result, but the result itself is obvious enough. ”