“The establishment of a normal working-day is the result of struggle between capitalist and labour.” Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Ch 10 Lengthy hours of work are never a good recipe for feeding the productivity machine. In Calvinist notions of hard work, the harder such toil is engaged in, the greater the prospects of gain. Combined with industrial rapacity, this doctrine produced terrible results for the toilers of the Industrial Revolution.
Men, women and children were drawn into the machine and ruined to the sound of rising capital. What, however, of actual productivity?
Karl Marx, ever the historical digger, was onto the point in Chapter 10 of Das Kapital: lengthier working days do not a more productive worker make. Taking aim at his ever familiar target of capital, “the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital.”[1]
Those things such as time spent for education and intellectual development; or social intercourse and “the free play of … bodily and mental activity, even the rest time on Sunday” would be mere “moonshine”. Capital, having a “were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour” usurps “the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body.” Sweden has been in the news of late for attempting to take the Marxist spirit to heart, with employers seeking to maximise the value of labour from the shorter work time offered. The latest reduction will take the form of a six-hour working day, though trials were already taking place last year.
Some work places in Sweden will not find the moves particularly novel – the Toyota centres in Gothenburg have been engaging in the practice for 13 years. Staff have registered levels of high satisfaction, which has been rewarded with low turnover rates and, shockingly to those across the Atlantic, high profits.
Linus Feldt, CEO of the Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus, has had his reservations of the eight-hour day for years. “To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge.” His strategy entails using pauses, improving the work mix “to make the work day more endurable.”[2]
Sweden’s more than mere flirtation with this idea has its roots in a broader historical debate. The balance between work and leisure, along with the ever increasing rise of capital, has been the battle of industrialised societies, typified by the rise of organised labour.
Australasia, in its pugnacious infancy, tended to be strides ahead of the pack in accepting that more leisure, better working conditions, and importantly, less work hours, would be productive to company profit and physical health. Chartist men such as James Stephens, a Welsh-born agitating mason derided by the Melbourne Daily Herald as a “stupid mischievous blockhead”, saw organised unionism as a weapon to blunt the broader ravages of unaccountable capital.
On April 21, 1856, stonemasons working on the site of the University of Melbourne made their point in marching on Parliament House, largely at Stephens insistence. The result of their pluckiness? The 48-hour week. Some of their views were sensibly observant, and the working movement in the antipodes took heed of the stresses inflicted by the environment on the working body for lengthy periods of time. As the Victorian Operative Mason’s Society Report (11 June, 1884) observed, “the period of labour under the relaxing influence of an Australian climate, cannot extend to the length of daily toil in the mother country [Britain], without sacrificing health, and shortening the duration of human life.”