CHAPTER IV.
MAXIMUM WORKING-DAY
In considering the question of protection of employment, we must first touch upon the restrictions of employment. These restrictions are directed to granting short periods of intermission of work, i. e. to the regulation of hours of rest, of holidays, night-rest and meal-times; also to the regulation of the maximum duration of the daily working-time, inclusive of intervals of rest, i. e. to protection of hours of labour.
Protection of times of rest, and protection of working-time, are both based on the same grounds. It is to the interest of the employer to make uninterrupted use of his business establishment and capital, and therefore to force the wage-worker to work for as long a time and with as little intermission as possible. The excessive hours of labour first became an industrial evil through the increasing use of fixed capital, especially with the immense growth of machinery; partly this took the form of all-day and all-night labour, even in cases where this was not technically necessary, and partly of shortening the holiday rest and limiting the daily intervals of rest; but more than all it came through the undue extension of the day’s work by the curtailment of leisure hours. Moral influence and custom no longer sufficed to check the treatment of the labourer as a mere part of the machinery, or to prevent the destruction of his family life. A special measure of State protection for the regulation of hours of labour was therefore indispensable.
Protection of the hours of labour is enforced indirectly by regulating the periods of intermission of labour: meal-times, night work, and holidays. But it may be also completed and enforced directly by fixing the limits of the maximum legal duration of working-hours within the astronomical day. This is what we mean by the maximum working-day.
The maximum working-day is computed sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Directly, when the same maximum total number of hours is fixed for each day (with the exception it may be of Saturday); indirectly, when the maximum total of working-hours is determined, i. e. when a weekly average working-day is appointed.
The latter regulation is in force in England, where 56½ hours are fixed for textile factories (less half an hour for cleaning purposes), and sixty hours (or in some cases fifty-nine hours) for other factories. In Germany and elsewhere the direct appointment of the maximum working-day is more usual: except in the von Berlepsch Bill (§ 139a, 3) where provision is made for the indirect regulation of the maximum working-day, by the following clause: “exceptions to the maximum working-day for children and young persons may be permitted in spinning houses and factories in which fires must be kept up without intermission, or in which for other reasons connected with the nature of the business day and night work is necessary, and in those factories and workshops the business of which does not admit of the regular division of labour into stated periods, or in which, from the nature of the employment, business is confined to a certain season of the year; but in such cases the work-time shall not exceed 36 hours in the week for children, and 60 hours for young persons (in spinning houses 64, in brick-kilns 69 hours).”
In the existing labour protective legislation, and in the impending demands for Labour Protection, the maximum working-day is variously enforced, regulated and applied. In order to arrive at a clear understanding of the matter it will be necessary to examine the various meanings attached by common use to the term working-day.
Let us take first the different methods of enforcement.
It is enforced either by contract and custom, or by enactment and regulation. Hence a distinction must be drawn between the maximum working-day of contract and the legal (regulated) working-day. Now-a-days when we speak of the maximum working-day we practically have in mind the legal working-day. But it must not be forgotten that the maximum duration of labour has long been regulated by custom and contract in whole branches of industry, and that the maximum working-day of contract has paved the way for the progressive shortening of the legal maximum working-day.
Even the party who are now demanding a general eight hours maximum working-day desire to preserve the right of a still further shortening of hours by contract, generally, or with regard to certain specified branches of industry; the Auer Motion (§ 106) runs thus: “The possibility of fixing a still shorter labour-day shall be left to the voluntary agreement of the contracting parties.”
Certainly no objection can be raised to making provision for the maintenance of freedom of contract with regard to shortening the duration of daily labour. The right to demand such freedom in contracting, is, in my opinion, incontrovertible.
Next we come to the various modes of regulating the maximum working-day.
It may either be fixed uniformly for all nations as the regular working-day for all protected labour, or it may be specially regulated for each industry in which wage-labour is protected; or else a regular maximum working-day may be appointed for general application, with special arrangements for certain industries or kinds of occupation. This would give us either a regular national working-day, or a system of special maximum working-days, or a regular general working-day with exceptions for special working days.
The system of special working-days has long since come into operation, although to a more or less limited degree, by the action of custom and contract. The penultimate paragraph of § 120 of the von Berlepsch Bill, admits the same system – of course only for hygienic purposes – in the following provision: “The duration of daily work permissible, and the intervals to be granted, shall be prescribed by order of the Bundesrath (Federal Council) in those industries in which the health of the worker would be endangered by a prolonged working-day.”
The mixed system would no doubt still obtain even were the regular working-day more generally applied, since there will always be certain industries in which a specially short working-day will be necessary (in smelting houses and the like).
The labour parties of the present day demand the regular legal working-day together with the working-day of voluntary contract.
By maximum working-day we must, as a rule, understand the national and international, uniform, legal, maximum working-day.
Thirdly, we come to the various aspects which the maximum working-day assumes according to whether it is given a general or only a limited sphere of application. In considering its application we have to decide whether or not its protection shall be extended to all branches and all kinds of business, and degrees of danger in protected industry, and further, whether, however widely extended, it shall apply within each industrial division so protected to the whole body of labourers, or only to the women and juvenile workers.
The maximum working-day is thus the “general working-day” when applied to all industries without exception. When this is not the case, it is the restricted working-day, which may also be called the factory maximum working-day, as it really obtains only in factory and quasi-factory labour. The term factory working-day is further limited in its application in cases where its protection extends, not to all the labourers in the factory, but to the women and juvenile workers only, or to only one of these classes. Hence a distinction must be drawn between the factory working-day for women and children, and the maximum factory working-day extended also to men. We shall therefore not be wrong in speaking of this as the working-day of women and juvenile workers, nor shall we be putting any force on the customary usage, if by factory working-day we understand the working day prescribed to all labourers in a factory.
We shall find a further limitation of the meaning in considering the aim of the protection afforded, for in certain cases the maximum working-day, even when extended to all labourers employed in a factory, is restricted to such occupations in the factory as are dangerous