ments; and owing to his meagre pay, the unskilled workman has been deprived of the ability to take advantage of them. When he receives a wage of $600 a year-and at this time the unskilled workman should receive this wage-opportunity for better living will come within his reach. The effect of this will be of great benefit to society at large, as well as to the unskilled workman himself. Not only is the workingman who has a comfortable home with proper sanitary appliances a better and more efficient workman than he who sleeps in a dirty lodging house or is crowded into a tenement, but society gains in other ways. Once the workingman obtains this income and learns how to use it, the drink bill of the community will be diminished, the expenditure for apprehending, trying, and imprisoning criminals will be reduced, and many other evils of society will be lessened. The most important result, however, of such an increase in wages upon the part of the unskilled workman would be an enormous incentive to industry, a vast increase in the demand for goods, and a more rapid march of the United States towards industrial supremacy.

The American trade unionists, therefore, should keep constantly in mind, and should, within the coming years, attempt to realize the ideal of a $600 minimum wage for unskilled workmen, whether of native or of foreign birth. The increase will pay for itself. A $600 man, working even as a common laborer, will be a better workman and a better citizen than the $450 man now doing this class of work, just as the latter is better than the Mexican peon working at twenty-five cents a day, or the Chinese coolie toiling for five or ten cents a day. The employer and the community in general will be better off when the conditions of labor are improved and the wages of the workingmen are increased.

High wages mean more than industrial efficiency, more than the gratification of the reasonable desires of the working population. They con-, tribute to the wealth and future of the nation, which are not to be measured by its palaces and millionaires, but rather by the enlightened contentment and prosperity of its millions of workers, who constitute the bone and sinew of the land.

CHAPTER XV

THE DAY'S WORK

Trade Unions Lessen the Hours of Labor. Work from Sun to Sun. Work of Government Employees. The Building Trades. The Working Day in Factories. The Struggle for the Eight-hour Day. Victories of the Cigar Makers and the Bituminous miners. Short Hours in Australia, the United States, England, and the European Continent. The Day's Work in the Sweated Trades. Advantage to the Capitalists and the Public. The Economy of Short Hours. The Experience of the Soft Coal Fields. Better Work and Better Men. Are Short-hour Laws Constitutional? "Decreasing the Hours Increases the Pay." Difference between Manual and Mental Workers.

THE

HE success of organized labor in increasing the wages of workmen has been brilliant and signal, but has not been more important than its success in reducing the hours of labor. An increase in the rate of wages means more of the comforts and luxuries of life; a decrease in hours, the opportunity to enjoy these comforts and luxuries. The shortening of the working day, further, stands for freedom from toil at the time when it becomes most exacting, nerve wearing, and dangerous; still further, it stands for leisure, recreation, education, and family life.

Reductions in the hours of work have been the more significant because such decreases, once gained, have been well defended and rarely surrendered. An increase in wages may perhaps be nullified in part by increased prices, a thing which cannot well occur in the case of a decrease in hours. Again, there is always a strong temptation for employers to seek to reduce wages as soon as bad times come, whereas at such times there is not so strong as the same incentive to increase hours, because there is less demand for labor.

During the nineteenth century American trade unions diminished the length of the working day from twelve, and in some cases fourteen, to ten, nine, and eight hours. At the beginning of the century man worked from sun

to sun, but in one industry after another the trade unions secured a radical reduction in the hours of labor. In this movement the Federal and State Governments aided. In 1840 President Van Buren instituted in the government navy yards a maximum ten-hour day, which was also accepted by other ship builders, and in 1867 the hours of labor were further reduced from ten to eight.

In the reduction of hours by means of trade unions the building trades have led all other organizations, owing to the fact that the unions in these trades were among the first to organize and to grow strong, and to the further fact that they were federated and acted in concert. Moreover, there was little competition between men employed in the building trades of one city as against those employed in the building trades of another city; that is to say, the building trade employees of New York or Philadelphia did not. compete with those of Baltimore or Charleston, and, therefore, no tendency could exist for the worst paid workmen in the country to set a standard for the best paid. At the beginning of the century the men in the building trades worked as long as daylight lasted, but shortly after the second war with Great Britain, the ship carpenters attempted to secure a reduction of work to ten hours, and by means of strikes, succeeded in the year 1825. During the next quarter of a century one victory after another was achieved by the various building trade organizations, so that at the close of the Mexican War, the general working time in the industry was ten hours a day. From that time on, especially after the close of the Civil War, a demand arose for a still further reduction of the working day from ten to eight hours. The cities had grown apace, and the distance from a man's home to his work. had become so great that the trip amounted to a considerable deduction. from his real leisure. The struggle for a maximum eight-hour day was accordingly taken up by the men in the building trades. Spurred on by the successes already achieved and encouraged by the gradual reduction of the hours of labor in England and Australia, the American building operatives, by means of a series of strikes, by negotiation, conciliation, and in other

ways, reduced the hours of labor to eight per day and in a number of trades to forty-four per week.

The same development has taken place, although to a somewhat less extent, in the factories. At the beginning of the century the factories frequently worked their hands twelve and fourteen hours, and for a long time they maintained an average of about eleven hours per day. The trade unions had attempted to secure a reduction of these hours by means of legislation and otherwise, but it was not until 1874 that the first law, by which the hours of labor were reduced to ten, was enacted. This law, passed in Massachusetts, was directed against the excessive labor of women and children, but in actual practice applied to workers of all ages and both sexes. During the next fifteen years one state after another, following the example of Massachusetts, adopted a working day of ten hours or less. In New Jersey the legal working time for women in factories is fifty-five hours per week, and in Massachusetts a reduction has now been made from sixty to fifty-eight hours. The Southern States, however, which have made rapid progress, especially in cotton manufacturing, have, as a general rule, not responded to the demand for a shorter working day-the South lacking effective labor organizations to compel such legislation.

Since the Civil War the task of securing shorter hours has devolved to an increasing extent upon trade unionists. After the close of the War, eight-hour leagues were established in various parts of the country, and hours were reduced in many places, but the activities of these leagues were interrupted by the crisis of 1873 and the bad times following, and it was not until the early years of the eighties that the work was again undertaken, in this instance by the Knights of Labor, and it is now being vigorously prosecuted by the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The benefits of the eight-hour day are being extended to many classes of workmen hitherto deprived of them. The Cigar Makers succeeded in obtaining the eight-hour day in 1885, the great majority of the bituminous miners in 1898 and 1899, and in 1903 the Anthracite miners obtained a nine

hour day. The New York State Department of Labor found that of 647,000 persons employed in factories inspected by it in 1901, 38%, and in New York City 54%, were working 94 hours a day or less. Among the organized laborers, the working hours were considerably less than this, almost one-half of the organized workmen and workwomen of the State of New York enjoying a maximum eight-hour day.1

The same struggle for a shortening of the working day is going on in England and Australia, in France, Germany, Belgium, and even in such backward countries as Italy, Spain, and Hungary. Generally speaking, the Englishman has secured shorter hours than the American, and the Australian shorter hours than the Englishman. The average length of the American working day may be fixed at about ten hours. In deciding upon

this number it must be taken into consideration that, while the vast body of organized laborers work a shorter time and while hundreds of thousands in the building trades work only eight hours or less, there are again hundreds of thousands employed on steam railroads, on the docks, on street railways, and elsewhere, whose working day is in excess of ten hours.

Owing to the fact that the work of the modern world is becoming more and more a matter of nervous energy, of skill, and intelligence, and less a matter of mere brute force, the reduction of hours is not only of advantage, but of absolute necessity. Even when work is simply and purely physical, it is not economical to work long hours, but a shorter day of labor is imperative when work is intense or when intelligence, ingenuity, and inventiveness are required. You cannot get more out of a man than is in him, and if you take too much one day, there will be so much less to obtain on succeeding days. As stated by Professor Clark of Columbia University: "If you want a man to work for you one day and one day only, and secure the greatest possible amount of work he is capable of performing you must make him work for twenty-four hours. If you would have him work a week

'The efforts of trade unions have also been directed towards maintaining Sundays and the usual holidays as days of rest.