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THE EIGHT-HOURS DAY AND THE

UNEMPLOYED.

THE

HE eight-hours day is usually preached both with most fervour and with most success as a gospel for the unemployed. No other argument has been so prominent or so influential in the present movement as the promise of mitigating and perhaps extinguishing that most unnatural of our social maladies, the unwilling idleness of willing hands. Nor is this any wonder, for what can be more captivating than the hope of seeing that troublesome malady become as obsolete as the plague? and what can at first sight appear either a surer or an easier way of making work for the idle than cutting a few hours off the work of the busy? The work seems already found, and nothing to remain but to count in the men to do it. It is a simple sum in arithmetic. If five million labourers do each twelve hours a week less work than they do now, how many supplementary labourers must you call in at forty-eight hours a week to supply the sixty million hours' service which the original staff have ceased to render ? By calculations of this description-which presuppose that when a great change is made in the hours of labour all the other conditions of the problem will yet remain unchanged-Mr. W. Abraham, M.P., thinks himself warranted in predicting that the general adoption of the eighthours day in England would provide work for 750,000 new hands, while Mr. Gunton, President of the New York Institute for Social Economics, and author of a work entitled "Wealth and Progress," which has exerted considerable influence on opinion on this subject, goes so far as to say that the "direct and immediate effect" of the general adoption of the eight-hours system in the manual trades of the United States, even excluding the great occupations of agriculture and domestic service, would absorb not only all the unemployed labour of that country itself, but all the unemployed labour of England,

Wales, Scotland, France, and Germany as well. It would create employment, he calculates, for 3,552,059 more adult labourers; and as he can only find one million of these in his own country, he is obliged to resort to Europe for the remainder. "This," he adds, "is not a fanciful speculation based upon an imaginary expansion of our home and foreign market, but it is what would necessarily result from the natural operation of economic forces in the effort to supply the normal consumption."

Now all this is entirely illusory. It stands in absolute contradiction to our now very abundant experience of the real effects of shortening the hours of labour, and it stands in absolute contradiction to the natural operation of economic forces to which it professes to appeal; and the illusion arises (1st) from simply not observing or apparently caring to observe the important alteration which the introduction of shorter hours itself exerts on the productive capacity of the workpeople; and (2nd) from yielding to the gross but evidently very seductive economic fallacy, which leads so many persons to think that they will all increase the wealth they individually enjoy by all diminishing the wealth they individually produce, and to look for a great absorption of the unemployed to flow from a general restriction of production, the very thing which in reality would have the opposite effect of reducing the demand for labour, and throwing multitudes more out of employ. It is worth while, however, examining more closely an illusion at once so popular and so persistent.

Taking the evidence of experience first, what has been the effect upon the unemployed of previous reductions of the hours of labour? What, for example, was the effect of the Ten Hours Act? That was

a short-hour experiment on the very largest scale, since it took eleven hours a week off the working time of no less than half a million textile workers, and it ought, therefore, on Mr. Gunton's principle of calculation, to have provided room for 90,000 new hands. How many new hands did it in the actual event make room for? Now we possess sufficiently satisfactory statistical records to guide us to the substantial truth on this point, and the evidence thus supplied compels us to the surprising but irresistible conclusion, that instead of making room for 90,000 extra workers the Ten Hours Act could not possibly have made room for a thousand, and most probably did not make room for a score. This, if true, is a fact of ruling and decisive importance, and I will therefore state particulars. The Ten Hours Act came into full operation on May 1, 1848, and there is a parliamentary return of the number of persons employed in factories in the United Kingdom in April 1847, immediately before the Act was passed, and another parliamentary return giving the number employed in them in July 1850, after the Act had been two Both the returns are practically complete except in

years at work.

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regard to the children employed in the silk trade in 1850, for though two or three firms (one of them being, it may be interesting to mention, John Bright & Brothers, of Rochdale) refused to supply the information parliament desired, they were too few to affect the results.

The total number of factory operatives in the United Kingdom in 1847 was 544,876; but the Act did not affect the hours of all that number. It legally reduced the hours of females and young persons from 69 to 58 a week (the hours were raised again to 60 in 1850), and it had the practical effect of reducing the hours of adult males as well in 90 per cent. of the factories of the kingdom; but it did not touch the hours of the children under 13, who numbered 42,882, nor of the adult male workers in a certain proportion of factories, which continued to keep their adult males at work for an hour or two after the women and young persons were obliged to leave. This practice was confined to a few localities, particularly the towns of Ashton, Stalybridge, and Oldham, which Mr. Horner thinks worthy of especial reproach, because the adult males of these towns were amongst the most prominent advocates of the Ten Hours Bill, and yet after the Bill passed they were ready in any number, he said, to work 13 and even 15 hours in the day. But though confined to certain localities, the practice applied to probably not less than 16,000 adult males. For most of these factories employed an extra shift of children to work along with the men after the women and young persons had to leave, and a return made in 1850 showed that there were then 257 factories that did so, and that they employed 3,742 children on these extra shifts. Now there was one child for every 3·2 adult males in factories generally in 1847, and if the same proportion

obtained in these 257 mills the number of adult males would be 11,974.

But there were other mills which kept their men employed extra hours without engaging children to accompany them, and Mr. Horner gives us a clue to their number by mentioning that out of 1,061 factories visited in 1850 by five of his sub-inspectors, 136 employed adult males after hours, but only ninety-five of these employed extra shifts of children. If the same proportion prevailed in the rest of the kingdom, there would be in this class of mill above 4,000 adult males whose hours were not shortened, but rather lengthened, by the new Act. We have thus to make a deduction of 42,882 children and 16,000 adult males whose hours were not restricted by the operation of the Act, and that leaves 485,994 as the number of operatives whose hours were actually diminished. The total amount of the diminution therefore was 5,345,934 hours a week, and that would, on Mr. Gunton's principle, create room for 92,170 new hands.

Now how many new hands were actually taken on? The total number of factory operatives in the United Kingdom in 1850 was

596,082, so that the whole increase from all causes together since the previous factory census of 1847 was 51,206-not much more than half the number Mr. Gunton would have anticipated; and the question comes to be, how much even of this increase, if any, is to be ascribed to the operation of the Ten Hours Act, and how much of it can be clearly ascertained to be due to other causes? The influence of other causes on the result is very apparent in the extreme inequality in the rate of the increase in the different textile industries, as the following table will show :

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A uniform reduction of 16 per cent. in the hours is thus not by any means followed by a uniform increase of 16 per cent. in the demand for labour, but by an increase of 52 per cent. in one industry and only 1 per cent. in another, while in a third it is followed apparently by a positive decline. Other causes of less uniform operation have therefore at least contributed to the result, and we must first, if possible, deduct their contributions before we can ascertain what, if anything, has been the contribution of the Ten Hours Act. Now the chief deductions must be made for the general effect of the ordinary growth of trade, as shown by the new mills opened and the increase in spindles, looms, and power, and for the special and very important effect of the revival of trade in 1850 in reabsorbing the multitudes thrown out of employment by the extraordinary commercial crisis of 1847.

The returns of 1847 were taken in March and the beginning of April, when this great crisis had already run three months of its acute stage, and was fast approaching its height, and a note is appended to the returns by the factory inspectors who collected the figures, stating that "a considerable number of factories being at present unoccupied and only partially at work, in consequence of the depressed state of trade, the total number of those now employed in the factories of the United Kingdom is, of course, not so great as in ordinary times

of prosperous trade." All the textile industries were seriously depressed at the time this factory census was taken, except perhaps the silk manufacture; and the great cotton industry, to which 60 per cent. of the operatives belonged, was in a condition of unexampled distress, because, besides the general causes producing depression in the other industries, the cotton manufacture suffered from an additional trouble of its own-the high price of its raw material, resulting from a deficient cotton harvest. Mr. Howell, one of the factory inspectors, says in his report of May 20, 1847:

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"During the half-year ended on the 30th ult. a lamentable and increasing decline has been observable in the several branches of manufacture subject to the Acts for regulating the labour employed in factories. . . . The distress has been, and continues to be, the most severe in the cotton districts, in which it is impossible to exaggerate its extent, but it has also reached other branches of industry, many factories being entirely closed, and the remainder working but very short hours. Very recently full employment was afforded in the silk-throwing mills, but in these also short time has been lately commenced."

Now trade had recovered from this depression when the second factory census was taken in July 1850, except in certain branches of the cotton trade, and to a slight degree in the silk trade; in both cases, on account of the high price of their raw materials at the time. Mr. Horner, on 31st October 1850, reports that while there was considerable depression in those branches of cotton manufacture in which the price of raw cotton constituted a considerable part of the cost of production, trade in the flax mills had improved, and there was great activity in the woollen mills. Mr. Saunders, on the same date, has the same story to tell of his district: "With the single exception of the manufacture of heavy cotton yarn and cotton goods, every branch of trade brought under my notice has partaken more or less within the last few months of the general activity which has prevailed throughout the manufacturing districts." He adds that the flax trade was one of those which had partaken largely of the increased demand for goods, but that the greatest activity of all had been in the worsted trade. Now can we measure the respective effects of this remarkable depression and of this remarkable revival of trade on the ranks of the unemployed? Data exist, I think, by which that can be trustworthily done, but as both the depression and the revival affected the respective industries in different ways and degrees, it will be necessary to consider each industry by itself.

To begin with the cotton trade, Mr. Horner reports in December 1846, that during the six weeks previous several mills had begun to work short time, and that a period of general and continued depression was approaching. The depression advanced with great rapidity. In January many mills were closed, and in March, when the factory census was taken, it was already in a most acute stage. We can follow the course of the crisis with tolerable precision by means of

official returns published week by week at the time by the Manchester Guardian, and these returns constitute also a very fair and useful gauge of the number who were actually unemployed at the date of the factory census. From these returns it appears that there were then 177 mills of all kinds in Manchester, that they employed when in full work 40,333 operatives, and that 23 of those mills were stopped and 7243 of their operatives were out of employment on the 23rd of March, 1847. The following table will show the course of the depression:

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