Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 86

Eight Hours Day

Eight Hours Day.

We want the working day for wage-workers in all government and municipal offices and places of employment and in all monopolies to be limited to Eight Hours by statute. We want an Hours of page 10 Labor Bill which will enable labor organizations to obtain, by government intervention, relief from excessive hours of toil as soon as a majority of them desire it, without resorting to the barbarous and dangerous expedient of a strike, with all its attendant tumult its stoppage of work, its expense, its privations, its waste of savings' dismantling of homes, and its black harvest of ill-feeling between employer and employed, striker and blackleg. Experience shews that whilst the present competitive-individualist system lasts, such Acts are necessary to prevent employers from inhumanly abusing their powers, and workers from working overtime with no permanent benefit to themselves. As soon as the people are free enough to feel them as a restriction of their own liberty, they will be free enough to repeal them without opposition as obsolete statutes. But at present the hours of labor imposed on the more helpless classes of wage-workers are literally murderous, and must be restricted by law.