The 35 hour week (without loss of pay) has been ACTU policy since 1957. Today, with mass unemployment and underemployment, we need to re-open the debate on the shorter working week and press the union movement to begin a campaign for 35 hours without delay.
The hours question has always been central to the workers’ struggle for a better life. Gradually, the bosses were made to concede the workers’ demands for shorter daily and weekly hours, paid holidays and so on. Every concession had to be wrung out of them and each time they screamed that they would be bankrupted by the workers’ “exorbitant” demands. As writer Barry Hill put it: “When we inspect the early development of capitalism, the better to get a grip on the time we are living in right now - we see that an essential part of the story is to do with social struggles about the ordering of the working day ...It was practical - who was going to hold the watch at the workbench if indeed, the workers were permitted to know the time at all?” [Barry Hill, Sitting In, Heinemann, Port Melbourne, 1991.]
Before the rise of industrial capitalism 200 or so years ago, time was viewed somewhat differently. As the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson has argued, peoples lives and work were more governed by the natural rhythms of the seasons and the hours of daylight. Most people did not possess clocks and small passages of time were described as, for instance, “a pissing wyle” or “an eating wyle”. Up until this century, Irish peasants often had watches with only an hour hand!
The Industrial Revolution ended all of this. Peasants were forced off the land and turned into industrial workers and henceforth their time was to be regulated according to the dictates of machines and profits. Indeed “hands”, as Hill notes, were often prohibited from bringing watches or clocks to work so that the boss could enjoy absolute “discretion” over their time. Even a “pissing wyle” was strictly defined by the needs of Henry Ford’s conveyor belt! The end of the process was “scientific management” or Taylorism, which viewed the worker as no more than an intelligent ape to be trained to perform a given number of set tasks within a prescribed time.
But workers are not apes. They are living, feeling, thinking human beings and they took seriously the ideas of “liberty, fraternity and equality”. In the 1850s English workers won the right to a 60 hour week of six ten hour days. Earlier, in the 1830s, child labour had been abolished in that country. In both cases the bosses screamed blue murder about such infringements of their “managerial prerogatives” and warned of the “death of the goose that laid the golden eggs”.
In 1856 Victorian stonemasons won the Eight Hour Day under the slogan of “Eight Hours Work; Eight Hours Leisure and Eight Hours Rest”. It was a significant milestone, but it was seen as a privilege of a small number of “deserving” craft unionists. It did not flow on automatically to others. Unskilled and semi-skilled workers - and above all women and “non-whites” - were not deemed worthy of it.
Yet, for all that, by World War I most workers had gained the 48 hour week and the idea of the standard working week was a reality. In 1927 the Federal Arbitration Court fell into line with the Queensland and NSW governments and granted the 44 hour week (five 8 hour days plus a half day on Saturday) to Australian workers.
Less than 20 years later, the ACTU launched a campaign for 40 hours at its 1945 Congress. The call met with an enthusiastic response, with an industrial campaign and mass meetings and processions. ACTU President Albert Monk declared that “We are going to get forty hours by hook or by crook”. In January 1946 the Queensland shearers refused to work longer than 40 hours and they were followed shortly afterwards by their NSW comrades.
The Queensland Industrial Commission granted shearers the 40 hour week on 24 May 1946 and the state Labor governments in Queensland and NSW followed suit by granting their employees the same. As a result, the Federal Arbitration Court had ample precedent for its decision to grant the 40 hour week to Australian workers in 1947. The bosses predictions of economic ruin failed to materialise...
Ten years later the ACTU adopted the 35 hour week at its 1957 Congress. Some workers already had it, most notably the Broken Hill miners, who won it in 1920 after a bitter struggle. But nothing much was done until militant unions turned their attention to it in the 1970s. Some workers, particularly seamen and oil industry workers, won the 35 hour week in this period. At the end of the decade the Altona petrochemical workers also won it, after a struggle which included the longest sit-in in Australian union history at the Union Carbide plant.
This, however, was the last gasp of a struggle that had run out of steam, with many unions settling for a 38 hour, nine day fortnight. The 35 hours campaign was in fact killed off by the ACTU in 1974. Many observers were stunned, among them Clyde Cameron, then a cabinet minister in the Whitlam Labor government. They saw in Barry Hill’s words: “the sudden disappearance of what would have been a landmark achievement...the power workers had a thirty-five case before the court that, if successful, would have changed the whole landscape of Australian work. It had the full support of the [Whitlam] Labor Government and then was dropped - withdrawn by the ACTU, says Cameron for reasons he would not confide.”
In fact the case was withdrawn by the then ACTU President Bob Hawke on the excuse that the Arbitration Court was annoyed with the actions of militant unions over the 35 hours, and that this might jeopardise the ACTU’s chances in the concurrent National Wage Case. An insight into Hawke’s mental condition and social network at the time is given on page 394 of Blanche D’Alpuget’s biography. An account of his drunken frolics with his rich mates, it does not make uplifting reading.
And there, action to reduce hours has rested. It was not on the agenda during the years of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments and indeed current ALP leader Kim Beazley categorically ruled it out when he was a minister in those governments.
Now we face the situation where the bosses and governments are winding back the industrial relations clock by 100 years or more. The average working week is almost 44 hours long and millions of workers are working excessive overtime, often without pay or for reduced penalty rates. Many employees work a “standard” 12 hour day and split shifts have re-appeared. In some non-union EBAs and individual contracts, hours of work are at the boss’s “discretion”. One wonders when these employees, like those of 200 years ago - will be prohibited from bringing watches to work.
It’s time for the union movement to say to the bosses: “You go no further.” It’s time to re-launch the campaign for 35 hours and to plan for the 30 hour week. We must wind the clock forward, not backwards!