Puffing up the fallacy claim
It was not late Victorian writers on economics but anti-union employers’ associations and their spokesmen who transformed the fallacy charge into a weapon targeted at the eight-hour day itself. In so doing they pointedly ignored the crucial distinction between shorter hours of work and restriction of output and instead fused the two, claiming that reducing the hours of work was no more than a tactic employed by the unions to restrict output.
The employers’ propaganda campaign commenced in England during a lockout of engineers that began in 1897. The precipitating incident for that lockout was the engineers’ demand for an eight-hour day but the underlying dispute concerned a struggle about control over the introduction of new machinery. The defining moment for the anti-union campaign came in a 1901 London Times series by Edwin Pratt titled “The Crisis in British Industry.” William Collison, the publicist for a strike-breaking organization called the National Free Labour Association, claimed the series was based on material supplied by him. Collison’s organization had served as the principal agency for recruiting replacement workers during the engineers’ lockout and had been active in propaganda activities against the unions.
The Times series described the rationale for the eight-hour day as being the absorption of all the unemployed by “obtaining employment for a larger number of persons on such work as there was already” instead of by the “laudable and much-to-be-desired means of increasing the volume of trade…” Pratt found this strategy objectionable because, without the disciplining factor of unemployment, “the workers would have the employers entirely at their mercy.”
This objection mirrors ironically the view put forward by J.–C.–L. Simonde de Sismondi and Marx that the threat of unemployment puts workers at the mercy of employers. Like Schloss or Rae, the Times series contrasted its own stance of economic realism with its opponents’ supposed primitive belief in a fixed amount of work. But nowhere was there a hint that the eight-hour day was socially or economically desirable, that a larger share of the national income should go to workers or, indeed, that total output in an eight-hour day might match or exceed that in the longer day.
In the United States, the National Association of Manufacturers embraced the same portrayal of a nefarious motive behind the eight-hour movement. In a 115-page pamphlet directed against the eight-hour bill in Congress, the manufacturers’ association blamed restriction of output by unions as “surely one of the chief causes of the industrial decline of England.” As for the shorter working day, the pamphlet declared that the movement for shorter hours was part of the general union strategy of restriction of output aimed at subordinating employers to the will of the unionists.
Coincidentally, at approximately the same time that the London Times and the National Association of Manufacturers were demonizing the eight-hour day and its advocates, an Industrial Commission established by the United States Congress was coming to a more sanguine estimation. According to the Commission’s final report, the shorter day represented “the most substantial and permanent gain which labor can secure.” The report argued that reduction of the hours of work was advantageous for the community because of its salutary effects on health, character, family life and citizenship. It declared that the case for an eight-hour day needed little qualification even from the standpoint of employers.
Although the report’s section on the hours of work is not signed, it appears likely that Commons drafted it. He is identified at the front of the volume as the Commission’s principal investigator on labor questions and was one of eight experts singled out for special acknowledgement in the letter of transmittal by the Commission chair, Albert Clarke. In addition, Commons testified before the Industrial Commission regarding the hours of work and his testimony stresses several of the same points made in the Commission’s final report.
Posted by sandwichman at July 4, 2005 06:08 PM