HOURS OF LABOUR.—The decade following 1910 witnessed
a rapid advance and extension in the already widespread movement
in favour of the reduction of the hours of labour. This was
mainly due, apart from general trade-union pressure, firstly to
the repercussions of the World War and of experience of industry
under war conditions, and, secondly, to the international recognition
of the principle of the 8-hour day in the Treaty of Peace of
Versailles as one of the “principles . . . well fitted to guide the
policy of the League of Nations.”
Until the outbreak of the World War the movement in favour
of the reduction of hours, and particularly in favour of the 8-hour
day, had gone forward but only slowly and spasmodically. International conferences of workers passed the ordinary resolutions demanding the 8-hour day, as did the International Socialist Conference of 1910, the International Textile Workers' Conference in 1911 and the eighth Congress of Trade Union Secretaries in 1913. In 1912 the International Association for Labour Legislation asked for a 56-hour week for glass-workers, an 8-hour day for the iron and steel trades, for workers in paper and pulp mills and in the manufacture of chemicals. In the following year the Miners' International Congress demanded the day of eight hours “bank to bank.” The official delegates of the Berne Conference in 1913 contented themselves with a proposal to limit the hours of child workers to 10 daily—a proposal which the International Association for Labour Legislation adopted in 1918, with the suggestion that part of the working day should be devoted to trade education. The Berne Conference further suggested a 10-hour day for women workers.
The comparatively moderate nature of the majority of these
pre-war proposals—and indeed of certain later ones, such as that
of the Congress of Inter-Allied Trade Unions at Leeds in 1916, which asked for the 10-hour day, and that of the International Trade Union Congress held at Berne in 1917, which demanded that the daily maximum should be gradually reduced to 8 hours—would hardly have prepared the student of these matters for the very striking advances which became operative in the chief industrial countries between the Armistice and 1921. The advance is also to be noted in recent expressions of trade union opinion, in the movement for the 7- and even for the 6-hour day in coal-mining, and in such pronouncements as that of so influential an employer as Lord Leverhulme in England, who in 1918 himself advocated the 6-hour day on economic grounds.
The outbreak of war had been followed in all the belligerent
countries by the suspension of all limitations upon the hours of
labour worked in industries of importance in the conduct of the
.war, whether these limitations arose from agreements with the
trade unions, from legislation or from custom. In all cases the
general course of events was the same. After some difficulty, varying
in degree with the imminence of the threat to national safety
and with the strength of trade unionism, the workers consented, were persuaded by tempting rates of wages, or were coerced to lengthen the working day. In all cases, after the experience of a period of excessively long hours, it was found that the returns from overtaxed labour rapidly diminished, and in all cases limitations were sooner or later re-imposed, not, however, reducing
hours to the pre-war standards, but calculated to yield the
highest return in output from the personnel available.