5-10-06, 8:33 am

During the past 150 years employers have never let up in their single aim of exploiting workers to the utmost to maximise profits and accumulate more capital to be able to exploit more workers and make even larger profits. There is no end to their greed.

The extension of the length of the working day and the working week is one of the principle ways in which it can achieve its goals – along with reducing wages to a bare minimum.

As Karl Marx wrote 120 years ago, “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” (Capital, Volume I)

Every hour, minute or second that a capitalist’s business (capital investment) remains idle is lost opportunity, lost profits and relatively higher costs. The more hours that the machinery turns over, that production is carried out, the more profitable the outcome will be (both in relative and absolute terms). Hence, employers are continually striving to increase the hours of work (as long as the market is there).

Marx wrote in the middle of the 19th century about their various techniques, which are as true to today as they were then.

Marx wrote of workers selling their labour power (capacity to work) as one person sells a commodity to another. The purchaser of this labour power is the employer. “And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again.”

That is certainly how the capitalist sees it. The worker’s capacity to work belongs to the employer, and the more work the employer can extract in a day and the lower the price paid (wages) the bigger the profits (what Marx called surplus value – the value of the labour over and above what was paid for).

“We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one.

“On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges.

“Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working-class.”

“The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour –the power of the labourer himself.”

The working day has a maximum limit. It cannot be prolonged beyond the physical bounds of labour power. “Within the 24 hours of the natural day a man can expend only a definite quantity of his vital force.”

In 1833 the English Parliament reduced the working day for children of 13-18 year old, in four branches of industry, to 12 full hours. The ordinary factory working day was declared to be from 5.30 in the morning to 8.30 at night with no less than 1.5 hours for meals. The work of children between 9 and 13 was reduced to eight hours, and forbidden below the age of 9. In 1847 the Ten Hours’ Act came into force.

None of these advances were handed on platter by grateful employers. They were won through bitter struggle. This same struggle continues today, where some of the advances that followed those dark years have already been snatched back by employers.

The first eight-hour day in 1856, and the shorter working weeks that followed, were a result of the struggle of the working class, of organised labour in the form of trade unions. As the trade unions grew in strength and numbers, many concessions were wrung out of employers. Not just shorter hours, but higher wages, better working conditions, paid holidays, safer conditions, and so on.

The capitalist class in Australia and elsewhere is waging an all out offensive to smash the trade unions, intimidate workers and take back those gains. In Australia it has the earnest cooperation of the Howard Government and the state machinery at its disposal.

The shorter working week amidst all the turmoil and attacks on trade union rights and working conditions has almost been forgotten in the today.

Yet it is so important for the quality of workers’ lives, for their safety on the job, for their families and communities. In times of rapidly rising productivity and with high unemployment, it is an important means of creating jobs and giving workers a bigger share of what should rightfully be theirs.

So, 150 years on the struggle continues for an eight-hour day on full wages.



--Anna Pha is editor of The Guardian newspaper published in Australia.