Encyclopedia of European Social History from 1350 to
2001.
Charles Scribner´s Sons: New York 2001.
WORK TIME
12
Gary S. Cross
Time at labor has depended on technological and economic realities but also on political power and cultural
values. Work time has decreased with modern industrialization, but that decline did not simply correspond with increased productivity nor has it decreased
at the same rate that consumption has risen. Moreover, especially since industrialization, patterns of
male work time have diverged from female hours of
labor.
ness for the merchant and producer. Moreover, hours
and days of labor varied greatly among crafts: workers
in luxury trades, where journeymen were often organized and skills in short supply, were able to restrict
work time, especially with traditions of holiday taking. In seventeenth-century Paris, craftspeople enjoyed up to 103 holidays, and in parts of northern
Italy in the sixteenth century the figure was about 95
(including Sundays). Many skilled trades celebrated
an informal ‘‘holiday’’ at the beginning of the week
in what, somewhat mockingly, was called St. Monday.
This custom epitomized an often-noted characteristic
of preindustrial labor: its preference for leisure over
increased income. When prices for their products rose
or when costs of living decreased, craft workers sometimes responded with working less and playing more
rather than attempting to accumulate wealth.
Still, workers in low-skilled trades or jobs requiring daily effort (like candle making or baking)
worked far more hours. Moreover, work time stretched
along almost all the course of a life. There was little
chance of saving for retirement or allowing the young
the luxury of a work-free childhood. In the sixteenth
century over 40 percent of the population of Italian
towns was under sixteen years old, and as late as 1820
in Britain some 48 percent of the population was under the age of twenty. Small wonder that child’s play
was sacrificed to work. Even the enlightened John
Locke supported ‘‘training’’ children in poor families
with work from the age of four, and apprenticeships
regularly started at ten. Equally, retirement was only
for the rich; with age, workers withdrew from labor
gradually or when incapacitated.
In periods of relative prosperity (like the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries), crafts workers reduced
the hours of labor sometimes by two hours per day.
This was possible because ‘‘employers’’—often little
more than suppliers of raw materials and marketers of
finished products—had little direct control over the
pace or methods of work. The actual production process was usually controlled by a father in a household
of workers, and these laborers were also often mem-
PREINDUSTRIAL WORK TIME
The cadence of preindustrial agricultural work was
often set by the season and weather. While labor from
sunup to sundown was common, the workday varied
by the task to be done. It was interrupted by feasts
and festivals that mostly coincided with slack periods
between fall harvest and spring planting or waiting
times within the growing cycle itself. Harvest holidays, followed by a series of festivals between Christmas and Mardi Gras, and then by a festival season
from Easter to Pentecost, filled the low point in the
activity of rural Europeans. Midseason holidays like
Midsummer or, in England, wakes week in August,
corresponded to lulls in farm work or to annual fairs
during which farm laborers found employment. Lack
of reliable timepieces allowed for irregular work habits, and labor was frequently interrupted by play and
rest breaks. Long days, often beginning before eating,
required three or more meal and drink respites.
In craft occupations, the lack of laborsaving devices meant twelve or more hours of work per day.
But long workdays were interrupted by seasonal slowdowns in demand for goods or supplies of raw materials. Capital could not be tied up in inventory,
especially when slow transportation already greatly retarded the cycle of production and sale. And the workweek was often characterized by short Mondays because workers had to wait for slow moving supplies
or for orders to arrive at the work site. The speed of
the oxcart or sailing ship controlled the pace of busi-
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bers of his family. This probably reduced work discipline that might have been imposed if labor and management had been separate. The employer seldom
entered this cottage and certainly had no direct means
of forcing weavers or spinners to work rapidly or
regularly.
Perhaps the greatest influence over preindustrial
work time was its common setting—within or near
the household dwelling. The so-called domestic economy allowed men to mix wage or piece work time
with numerous other forms of employment and tasks
that helped to provision and maintain the household
(cutting firewood, etc). Of greater significance was
the close integration of productive and family-caring
work time that fell to women. In the domestic setting
they were able to shift quickly from household and
child care work to agricultural or craft production
according to the needs of the family. The complex
blending of work roles was an economic and biological necessity that often meant a female workday that
‘‘never ended.’’
Attempts to increase output by increasing labor
time devoted to the market was a key element in the
development of modern capitalism. Repeatedly, governments tried to restrict holidays (for example, to
twenty-seven per year in England in 1552) or even to
impose a minimum workday (to twelve hours per day
in England in 1495). During the Puritan revolution
in England authorities attempted to eliminate traditional religious festivals and to impose instead a strict
observance of a Sabbath rest. This was supposed not
only to increase annual workdays but to create a regular pattern of work and recuperation appropriate for
industrial and commercial work. Similarly, during the
French Revolution employers were given authority to
set work time, and the experiment with the ten-day
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WORK TIME
week was to make a more productive workforce than
the traditional Christian week. These efforts had
mixed results.
From the sixteenth century, English merchants
tried to tap ‘‘underutilized’’ rural labor by putting
farmers to work in the winter at spinning yarn or
weaving cloth. This so-called putting-out system,
however, frequently frustrated merchants because the
episodic and slow pace of agricultural work made
these part-time peasant artisans undisciplined and unreliable producers. One solution, advocated by early
eighteenth-century economists, was to lower pay to
cottage workers to force them to extend their weekly
working hours (devoted to market tasks). The common view was that domestic workers had a fixed notion of an appropriate standard of living. If pay rates
rose above that standard of subsistence, they would
work fewer hours. Only the whip of low rates would
induce them to lengthen and intensify their work
time. A seemingly more effective means of quickening
the pace and length of the workday was the mechanization and central management that came with
industrialization.
sion of the workday. In the mid-nineteenth century,
male Birmingham metalworkers preserved a three-day
workweek. Similarly, skilled workers on the Continent
maintained St. Monday traditions deep into the century. The real lengthening of the workday took place
mostly among workers in mechanized textile mills and
other trades competing against machines and overcrowding. In any case, early industrialization did not
mean a reduction of work time, but rather economic
growth.
Another impact of the centralized workplace
was the gradual removal of wage work from the home.
This eventually led to the withdrawal of men from
domestic chores and forced women into making difficult compromises between wage and family obligations. Ultimately, the separation of work and domestic
life resulting from the removal of materials and machines from the home obliged female workers to embrace a clear separation of wage from family care work.
Often this meant that working-class women experienced a new and distinct work life cycle—wage work
when young and single followed by home-bound family and household work when married with children—should the husband’s income be sufficient to
support the family.
Market work time decreased faster than that of
home-based work. This was partly a function of different rates of technological change and partly due to
the intractable, time-consuming character of domestic
work. This put family work on a very different plane
than wage work. The ‘‘housewife’s’’ work did not disappear, of course, but neither did its value enter the
calculus of the money economy. Family work was hidden in the clouds of the private. As a result, work time
became sharply gendered. For men, time liberated
from wage work became ‘‘free’’ from work obligations
in private leisure; for women, family-related chores
remained in a privatized realm of work with no segmentation of time into ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘obligated’’ periods.
WORK TIME AND EARLY
INDUSTRIALIZATION
The centralized workplace is often viewed as the most
important development of early industrialization, insofar as it made possible the imposition of work discipline and the lengthening of the working day. Not
only did the factory make regular working hours a
condition for employment, but new managerial and
mechanized techniques enhanced the ability of the
employer to intensify work time. Mechanization, especially in steam-driven textile mills, provided employers with incentives to raise working hours to
twelve or even fourteen hours by the 1820s (the latter
especially in France and Belgium). Efforts to amortize
costly equipment over a shorter period, attempts to
reduce costs as competition increased and prices
dropped, and hopes of taking advantage of new gas
lighting all encouraged the lengthening of working
hours.
Historians, however, have increasingly questioned the impact of the factory on enforcing time
discipline. The sweating system, which imposed on
piece-rate workers in the garment and other trades
such low prices that they were forced to ‘‘voluntarily’’
extend their working hours to survive, played a major
role in the intensification of work. Moreover, many
skilled trades outside the factory system (even those
with central workplaces) were able to avoid exten-
REDUCING WORK TIME
IN THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
While rising productivity made possible the diminution of work time, the timing and extent of the reduction depended upon international labor and political movements that fought with management over
control of the labor market and workplace. This struggle was shaped by the language of industrial efficiency
and mass consumption but also by a gender order that
rigidly divided wage labor from family work. The reduction of public working hours has been episodic,
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usually bitterly resisted by employers and governments, certainly far more so than the other contested
fruit of industrial productivity—the increased power
to consume.
Efforts to reduce the workday to ten hours
spanned the years from the 1840s until about 1900.
A generation of agitation for a ten-hour day in the
textile mills of Britain resulted in an 1847 law restricting that work time standard to women and children
(although men won it also in bargaining and where
their work depended upon the protected groups). In
France the political upheaval of the midcentury produced a maximum-hour law in 1848, but it was restricted to workers in mechanized factories. Gradually
the ten-hour provision was extended in Britain to
many trades. Only in 1904, after twenty-three years
of legislative struggle, was a ten-hour law passed in
France for women.
Movements for an eight-hour day broadly
stretched from the mid-1880s until 1919. The ‘‘threeeights,’’ the equal distribution of the day between
work, rest, and leisure, was a slogan for a generation
of May Day labor and socialist parades from 1890.
International groups from the socialist Second International to the reformist liberal International Labor
Office advocated simultaneous transnational improve-
ments in the labor standard (including a reduction of
work time). Despite active movements for a universal
eight-hour day in England from 1888 until 1892 and
repeated strikes in many European countries in which
the eight-hour day was a major issue (for example, the
May 1906 general strike in France), employers and
legislators stood firm against it. A principle impediment was fear that an hour’s reduction in any one
company or country would put that entity at a competitive disadvantage with less generous employers or
nations.
The eight-hour day became a nearly universal
concession only during the labor upsurge that accompanied the closing years of World War I (1917–1919).
Eight-hour proclamations, beginning in the Russian
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, spread in 1918 to
Finland, Norway, and then to Germany in the wake
of collapse and revolution in November. By midDecember the movement passed to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. From the revolutionary regimes
of eastern and central Europe, it spread to Switzerland. In Britain, from December 1918 to March
1919, major industries rapidly conceded reductions
in work time. In February the movement reached Italy
in a wave of shutdowns that affected, in turn, metals,
textiles, chemicals, and even agriculture. And in
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WORK TIME
France in April 1919, a new parliament approved of
an enabling act for an eight-hour/six-day workweek.
This insurgency also produced eight-hour laws in
Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland by June and in the
Netherlands and Sweden by November 1919. Nearly
everywhere, workers used this unique opportunity for
reform to increase leisure time. International pressure
from below was paralleled by hopes that the eighthour day would become international law, removing
the traditional fear that a raised labor standard would
put an industry or country at a competitive disadvantage on the international market. Committed to this
goal was a transnational network of reformers often
rather erroneously labeled ‘‘Wilsonians.’’ In 1920 the
eight-hour day became a transnational labor standard,
protected by an international convention sponsored
by the International Labor Organization.
The concept of the forty-hour week with a twoday weekend had its roots in the nineteenth century
with the Saturday half-holiday. As a means of granting
women workers Saturday afternoon to shop and prepare for Sunday, it was embraced by English textile
mills in hopes of improving and stabilizing workingclass family life. Skilled male workers also demanded
and often won the half-holiday from the 1850s. Only
from 1889 did French reformers call for the Saturday
half-holiday. The semaine anglaise (English week,
named after its English origins) alone was a guarantor
of the ‘‘sanctity’’ of Sunday rest and family togetherness, they argued. Especially where women worked
and where men were well organized, the Saturday
half-holiday was won after 1917.
The more radical two-day weekend became a
goal of labor movements in France and Britain in the
1930s (in the form of a forty-hour week). This standard became law in France in June 1936 during the
strikes that accompanied the beginning of the leftist
Popular Front government. However, business bitterly
opposed this unilateral disarmament of the French
economy, and the work time standard was eliminated
in late 1938 as an impediment to preparation for war.
Many wage earners in Europe won the weekend/fortyhour week only in the 1960s.
Until World War I a paid annual holiday was
rare, except in some white collar and government occupations where paperwork was made up after a break
or where a seasonal slowdown in business made a vacation feasible. The movement for the paid annual
holiday intensified in the interwar period. Between
1919 and 1925 legislation provided paid vacations in
six eastern and central European countries. The movement peaked in the mid-1930s with the widespread
support for the two-week paid vacation in France in
1936 and a week’s holiday in many British industries
in 1938. Ironically, in spite of massive unemployment
and deep ideological fissures within Europe, the vacation became a near universal ideal. It responded to
deep needs that transcended ideology and economic
system. In the generation after World War II, the vacation became the leisure concept of choice for most
Europeans: the one- or two-week holiday expanded
to three or more weeks in the prosperity of the 1950s
and 1960s and commonly was from four to eight
weeks by the end of the century. As a result of these
changes, average hours worked in France and West
Germany dropped from 38 and 44 hours respectively
in 1950 to 31 hours by 1989.
IDEOLOGIES AND DILEMMAS
OF REDUCING WORK TIME
Popular pressure for reduced work began in reaction
to efforts of nineteenth-century employers to impose
regular and increased intensity of output on labor.
These movements were inspired by a variety of work-
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based and essentially defensive motivations: to decrease
machine use and thus output and layoffs due to ‘‘overproduction’’; to win a larger share of income from increased productivity by raising wages through greater
overtime and making labor more scarce; and to reduce
seasonal unemployment by extending batches of work
over a longer period.
a clear separation between the masters’ time and their
own. The intermingling of work and life for many
dependent workers—in shops, farms, or domestic service—was not an ideal to be defended but a curse to
be overcome.
The eight-hour movement of the early 1890s
cut across the trades in England, France, and Germany. It was not confined to long-hour occupations
or even to laborers with special workplace rights to
defend. Mechanization, reformers argued, should not
only provide increased material goods but free workers
from ‘‘slavery’’ and introduce them to the ‘‘duty’’ to
enjoy life. When the eight-hour day was won for most
in 1919, trade unionists argued that a longer day was
‘‘unnatural.’’ British trade unionists insisted that differences in intensity, productivity, skill, and danger of
work should be reflected in wages, not hours. To deny
the eight-hour day was to deprive workers of citizenship and even ‘‘manhood.’’
These arguments clearly challenged laissez-faire
orthodoxy by claiming that the workplace and labor
contract were subject to public protection and citizenship rights. As important, reduced work time
threatened the employers’ power in ways that wage
increases did not. It could raise wage costs (either in
overtime rates or simply because the employer had to
hire more labor, which reduced the labor pool and
thus raised wages), and it could force employers to
buy expensive machinery, accumulate inventories (in
anticipation of later sales), and thus tie up capital. By
contrast, an unrestricted workday adjusted at will allowed the employer to avoid these costs during expansions. Finally, whereas wage increases could be easily reversed in response to prices (at least in the
nineteenth century), employers feared that this would
not be possible with hours. A shorter workday, then,
threatened to slow the turnover of capital and to
choke off profits. At the same time, workers were seldom able to reduce hours through negotiation. During economic downturns—when they had an incentive to share jobs through shorter regular hours—they
lacked bargaining power. During economic booms,
when they had the advantage of a tight labor market,
many individual workers had to replenish income lost
during the last recession by working overtime.
Most important, competition, especially as the
market extended internationally, dissuaded employers
from reducing hours. In the 1830s and 40s competition between English and continental textile mills
justified British resistance to the ten-hour day. The
same fear blocked the eight-hour day in the 1890s,
and economic nationalism in the 1920s similarly
threatened the newly won eight-hour day. There were
also social and cultural impediments to reduced work
Arguments for reform. Most historians have seen
these short-hour movements as essentially wage driven.
A minority, like William Reddy and Neil Smelser,
argue that these demands were instead intended indirectly to perpetuate the domestic work unit and patriarchy. Both views, however, underestimate changing attitudes about work and the origins of the
demand for blocks of time free from employment.
Industrialization not only increased productivity, making a reduction of labor time feasible, but physically
separated productive from ‘‘reproductive’’ or family
activities. The expulsion of leisure from the workplace
and the spatial division of home and work required
an equally sharp time demarcation. Thus, interest in
regular blocks of daily, weekly, and eventually yearly
time free from wage labor increased as the only way
for men especially to recover family and leisure time
lost to disciplined work. Moreover, many nineteenthcentury laborers saw the traditional custom of working at a series of seasonal jobs and tramping from job
to job replaced by stationary and regular employment.
Wage-earners greeted the passing of the old ‘‘porous’’
workday, idealized by E. P. Thompson and other historians, with ambivalence. Despite the loss of a sociable work culture, in the long run workers demanded
a reduction of work time to enhance the opportunity
of social relationships off rather than on the job.
Working-class men abandoned the pub of their workmates for the neighborhood bar, which they increasingly visited with their wives. Long evenings began to
count more than long work breaks. The movement
for the Saturday half-holiday and full weekend reflected a similar interest in uninterrupted periods of
family and leisure time. For these workers, leisure was
to be realized in a new distribution of time—a uniform and compressed workday with longer, more predictable and more continuous periods of personal
time.
Reduction of work time was more than an adaptation to industrialization. It was also a practical
expression of the demand of wage earners for freedom
from the authoritarian relationships of work. For example, shop or office workers sought to limit the employers’ access to their time. In seeking to end the
‘‘living-in’’ system that required wage earners to reside
at their workplace, these workers attempted to create
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WORK TIME
time. The idea of the right to free time raised concerns
about the use of leisure by the male working class.
Elites associated this leisure with disorder, imprudent
consumption, and radical politics. This was one rationale for the refusal of the British Parliament to grant
the ten-hour day to men in 1847.
Thus major hours reductions were intermittent
and very difficult to win. They coincided with the
social and political upheavals of 1847/1848, 1919,
and 1936–1938, often requiring simultaneous international and cross-class movements, and they often
followed long intellectual debate and political struggle. Rarely can they be correlated with economic
trends.
This lack of correlation is ironic because the
most successful arguments to reduce wage work time
were economic rather than political. Repeatedly, reformers argued that shorter hours optimized output
and human capital and increased mass consumer
spending. Nineteenth-century political elites were
relatively open to arguments that linked reduced work
time to bodily safety. For example, in France the
twelve-hour law of 1848 applied to men working in
factories because these workplaces were deemed ‘‘dangerous’’ (as opposed to domestic or open air work
sites). Work time agitators were almost obliged to
overstress the harmful and involuntary character of
mechanized work. This emphasis removed factory
workers from the ranks of ‘‘free adults’’ and made
them subject to the kind of protection given to minors. Yet the framing of the debate in these terms
deflected the argument away from the citizen’s right
to a shorter workday.
Frustrated hour reformers also embraced industrial efficiency and mechanization as a means of reducing the costs of reduced work time. From the
1890s on the European Left found in the United
States ‘‘proof ’’ that industrial efficiency made for both
less work time and more output. Labor groups found
allies among efficiency scientists who sought optimal
output over relatively long work periods rather than
short-term maximum production at the price of longterm labor fatigue and deterioration. From about
1900 to 1920, various studies found an overly long
work period was self-defeating, for it led to absenteeism and reduced efficiency and often was no more
productive than shorter work spans. Investigators
discovered that early morning work (before the traditional 8:00 A.M. breakfast break) and work on Saturday afternoon hardly justified fixed capital expenditures. This research provided a powerful support for
the reduction of work time after World War I.
Wage earners were often slow to embrace the
trade-off of increased productivity for shorter hours,
fearful that increased efficiency would result in layoffs.
By the mid-1920s, however, European unions were
beginning to reject the linkage between increased
productivity and joblessness. Instead, they embraced
mechanization and even the scientific management
advocated by Frederick Taylor, as a way to preserve
the normal workday of eight hours and to win the
forty-hour week.
Work time diminutions were also supposed to
stimulate mass consumption. An early form of this
argument (from the 1830s) claimed that shorter hours
would shift wealth from capital to labor by making
labor scarce and thus more costly, and thereby encouraging popular spending. Shorter hours would
shift investment away from luxury goods to more profitable mass markets. A different, and in the long run
more politically acceptable, argument emerging in the
1880s claimed that shorter hours meant leisure time
sufficient to create desire for new consumer goods
(without necessarily increasing labor costs).
Work time, family, and gender roles. Finally,
given an inhospitable political culture, short-hour advocates did not argue for free time for men (still
deemed subversive), but adopted a familial rhetoric in
the defense of personal life. In the nineteenth century
legal reductions of working hours could be justified
only if shorter work time facilitated the fulfillment of
family duties. It justified liberation from wage work
if it was deemed socially necessary, as was women’s
‘‘free time.’’ Female time liberated from wage work
was not a threat, for it was not ‘‘free’’ but rather necessary family and housework time. Thus legislators
were won far earlier to the principle of reduced wage
time for women. Nineteenth-century employers attacked St. Monday, the custom of taking part or all
of the day following the Sabbath as a holiday, as a
threat to work discipline. But gradually they accepted
the idea of the Saturday half-holiday (for women especially) because it was necessary to prepare for family
life on Sunday. This idea of a protected time for female domesticity had an appeal that crossed the gap
between workers and middle-class reformers. Inevitably workers and their allies embraced an ideology of
rescuing motherhood, creating at least a ‘‘part-time’’
housewife in the wage-earning married woman. Maledominated workers’ movements thoroughly embraced
the ideal of the women’s domestic sphere. Even
though men often used laws that granted only women
shorter hours to gain free time for themselves (because
factories often could not function without female labor), this hiding behind women’s petticoats fully embraced the primacy of domestic work for women. Indeed, hour reductions for women were conveniently
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used to drive women out of some jobs. Opposition of
women’s groups to shift work (especially in the 1920s)
shared a similar assumption: factory labor should not
be tolerated at ‘‘unnatural’’ hours when women had
obligations of child and home care (coordinated with
the working hours of men and children). Women’s
participation in the short hours movement reinforced
the expectation that their time was to be organized
around ‘‘family’’ needs that stretched across the divide
between the private and public. The quest for the
‘‘normal workday’’ of ten and then eight hours was
an integral part of an ideology of separate sex spheres.
Familial rhetoric did not exclude the ‘‘duties’’ of
men entirely. The short-hours movement embraced
the ideology of the ‘‘respectable working-class father.’’
Less work time meant more gardening and other
quasi-farming rituals for men. By the 1850s in Britain, the Saturday half-holiday had become an important symbol of family life and even of a more ‘‘democratic’’ fatherhood. Reformers argued that Saturday
afternoons free from wage work provided fathers with
the opportunity to spend time with their children.
Early twentieth-century French trade union propaganda painted a picture of the eight-hour father with
sufficient job security and time to provide for his family and to ‘‘guide’’ his children. These references to
free time for fatherhood, however, were vague and
rare. From the 1920s reformers argued that the annual
paid vacations would restore the spiritual unity of the
family undermined by the modern functional division
of family members. Both the Left and Right embraced
the extended holiday, for it fitted a common gender
and family ideology: vacations would provide family
time away from domestic routines. It would enable
the father to learn paternal roles while at play with his
children.
The family ideology of short-hours movements
was not mere opportunism. It was more an appeal to
bourgeois obsessions with domestic standards and
guilt over denying working-class men housewives. In
the details of negotiations over work time in the five
years after 1919, family issues were central. Especially
important to unions were the elimination of beforebreakfast work and an eight-hour day that was
stretched out in split shifts. Organized workers resisted two- or three-shift systems, especially in textiles,
where women predominated. The ideal was not
merely a short but also a compressed workday to free
longer blocks of time for private life, especially for
meeting the needs of coordinating family schedules.
Still a conflict remained: on one side stood the
mostly male model of public obligation and private
freedom; on the other, the married female experience
of obliged time that made obtaining wage work dif-
ficult. For some it meant accommodating a work
schedule stretched between wage work, commuting,
and private household and family care work. As long
as the necessary work of family remained a female
responsibility, equity in that work was impossible. And
the shorter hours movement systematically avoided this
issue, despite talk of improved fatherhood. The predominance of men in the public labor market guaranteed that the ideology of the male provider dominated movements for shorter hours. The language of
‘‘free’’ time implied that men’s family work obligations were fulfilled by their wages. The demand for
reduced work time reinforced the perception of public
time (contested for control, valued as ‘‘money’’ and
‘‘productive’’) as radically split from private time
(deemed to be unconstrained and without economic
value).
LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY ATTEMPTS
TO REDUCE WORK TIME
This perception of the scheduling of work time has
predominated until the late twentieth century. Since
the 1980s there have been a number of challenges to
this scheduling of work time. Rising unemployment
led West German metalworkers to push for a thirtyfive-hour workweek, and the French Left, returning
to power in the 1980s, favored weekly hour reductions
as a work-sharing program.
As important, dramatic increases in married
women’s employment, especially after 1960, have undermined the prevailing gender division of work time.
Implicit in the concept of the eight-hour day/fortyhour week was the assumption that it was worked by
men outside the home while family and household
care work was done by a wife. The introduction of
massive numbers of married women into the workforce (reaching 60 percent or more in most European
countries) hardly produced a ‘‘symmetrical family’’ of
gender equity in the sharing of wage and domestic
work time. In this context feminists, union leaders,
and others began to advocate more flexible work
schedules. Such adaptability could reduce rigidity in
production schedules and staffing services (favored by
businesses) but flexible working hours could also facilitate the complex needs of families and individuals.
Of special concern were the needs of young families
to balance child care and employment time.
As in the past, these efforts have met with strong
resistance. The French effort to reduce work to thirtyfive hours in the 1980s was frustrated by the antiregulatory politics of conservative governments in
Britain and Germany, which impeded any coordi-
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nated hour reduction. Later reformers have been unable to re-create the international coalition that supported the eight-hour day in 1919. In some ways the
generation of World War I was a golden age of labor
internationalism—when a rough economic equality
between industrial states existed. Since the 1920s the
opportunities to free time from work on an international basis have been much more difficult to win.
Economic nationalism in the 1930s and especially fascism in Germany and Italy frustrated French efforts
to institutionalize a forty-hour work week. More recently, the advent of authoritarian third world industrial powers and increased competition between oppressed third world and Western labor has frustrated
even those workers who have unions or a foothold in
the state, limiting their ability to break with the discipline of the international market and to free time
from work.
As important, the goal of reducing the working
day may have lost the appeal that attracted so many
earlier to the eight-hour day. Time lost in commuting
and the marginal usefulness of, for example, an additional half-hour per day may make other allocations
of free time much more attractive. Individualized
packages of time such as additional vacation, child
care leave, earlier retirement, and flextime have replaced the social ideal of a uniform reduced workweek. Yet such personalized schedules have been hard
to win through collective bargaining or law, which
generally presume uniform standards and seem to
threaten the return of a divisive individual labor contract. Moreover, the older ideal of ‘‘family time’’ has
been frustrated by the spread of shift work (first during World War II and then as contract concessions).
The efforts of unions and women’s groups early in the
century to preserve family time by opposing ‘‘unnatural’’ hours has succumbed to the logic of international markets and the drive after 1945 to increase
production. Attempts of chain stores to extend hours
to Sunday or nights in the 1980s and 1990s generally
have failed. Still, the value of family time is increasingly attacked as contrary to American-style consumer
convenience.
Underlying these difficulties is the legacy of the
short-hours movement itself. On the one hand, that
movement addressed the ‘‘public’’ issues of regular
employment, work intensity, and job control; on the
other, it treated ‘‘freedom’’ as disengagement from
public obligation in favor of private time. This dichotomy obscured the sexual dynamics of domestic
work time and the fact that ‘‘after hours’’ means very
different things for women and men. It also has ostensibly privileged the private life while giving family
time no value comparable to waged time and placed
its greatest burden on wives and mothers. Meanwhile
men (and increasingly women) remain obligated to
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driven work and segmented lives built around ‘‘providing’’ and the frustrated dreams of private fulfillment. Ironically, the short-hours movement that
gloried the private life has contributed to its being
undervalued.
The long-term trend of industrial economies
toward growth without new jobs may increase pressures for the reduction of work time. And the tendency of economies across the globe to converge to-
ward a similar labor standard may help revive an
international desire for short-hours, as in 1919 (at
least within the European Community). Moreover,
the two-income family with its burden of wage hours
is also a likely site for the building of a new quest for
time. Inevitably, it will be expressed in terms radically
different from the earlier eight-hour struggles because it would not be based on the same gender
assumptions.
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