the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 5, 2024
In an article entitled, “The case for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay” (in the Washington Post, March 19), U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain made the case for a shorter work week, calling it necessary and possible.
They point out that the 40-hour week has been on the books for 84 years, ever since Congress updated the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1940. Since then, Fain and Sanders say, “American workers are more than 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s.”
In other words, one worker today produces as much as what four to five workers produced 84 years ago. These enormous productivity gains should have allowed workers to earn not only higher wages but also many fewer hours at work.
But, clearly, that is not what happened.
Sanders and Fain explain, “Almost all the economic gains have gone to the top, while wages for workers are stagnant or worse.”
Moreover, the amount of working time has gone up: “In fact, 28.5 million Americans, or 18% of U.S. workers, now work over 60 hours a week … and more than half of all full-time employees work more than 40 hours per week…. Despite these long hours the average worker in America makes almost $50 per week less than he or she did 50 years ago, adjusting for inflation.”
“This should not be happening in the United States of America in 2024,” protest Sanders and Fain. But it is. And Sanders and Fain don’t ask how this happened.
The reality is that the fall in living standards and rise in work hours, despite growing productivity and wealth, is not some exception or aberration. Throughout its history, the capitalist class has pushed to enrich itself at the expense of its workforce—and not simply because of individual greed or ruthlessness. And the attempt of capital to take an ever larger share of the value produced by labor has, from capitalism’s very beginning, commonly taken the form of a push to lengthen the hours workers put in by the day, week or month.
The growth of capitalism in Europe, where it first developed, came at the price of the barbaric destruction of the living standards of a large part of the population. In order to take an ever larger share of the value that labor produced, work time was greatly increased.
Peasant life had been precarious under feudalism, shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. But the amount of time the peasants actually spent working in a day was limited, and the peasants also benefitted from a religious calendar which fixed the sabbath “rest days,” church holidays, and feasts. All told in England, leisure time took up about one third of the year, even more in France.
Certainly, the feudal landlords oppressed the peasantry, robbing them of part of their labor, taking a share of the crops, as well as several weeks of free labor a year. But, in return, feudal custom allowed the poor and landless peasantry collectively to use vast tracts of the landlords’ uncultivated lands. In fact, feudal land ownership ensured for hundreds of years the survival of vast peasant masses.
But in the 18th century, in the early stages of the industrial revolution, the feudal landlords began to drive the peasants off the land. Fields were fenced off, peasants and their crops were replaced by vast herds of sheep to produce wool for the early textile industry. The first stages of the industrial revolution turned peasants into paupers, beggars or petty criminals—or into day labor under which the former peasants rented themselves out to the nearest small “manufacturer.”
The industrial and technological revolutions produced by developing capitalism multiplied the ability to produce with unprecedented speed and power. Everything from industry to agriculture to trade was transformed. But, because ownership of the means of production remained in private hands, these transformations and revolutions brought about much greater inequality, much greater wealth at one pole and much greater poverty and misery on the other.
In both England and America, men, women and children in home-based and factory labor, farm laborers, slaves, domestic servants, and even male craftsmen experienced a progressive lengthening of work hours, from 12 to 14 and even 16-hour days, six days per week. Moreover, the English laboring population lost nearly all the regular holidays people in feudal society had. The capitalists managed to turn important technological advances, like the introduction of artificial light, against the workers by stretching the working day far into the night, and schedules climbed.
The ravages of the long working day destroyed workers’ health and stunted the growth of children, often leaving them crippled for life. Even military leaders were concerned about the physical condition of future conscripts, a significant proportion of workers being discharged because of their insufficient height or their disabilities.
“The capitalistic mode of production … produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labor-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labor-power itself. It extends the laborer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time,” wrote Karl Marx in 1867.
At first the new proletarians were stunned by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production. But workers began to resist. Workers’ movements started in England, where capitalism developed first. The shorter working day and improved working conditions were part of the general protests and agitation from the Chartist movement, the first great movement of the working class on a national scale, which shook England in the 1830s and early 40s, and the early organization of trade unions. These first struggles of the working class imposed limits on the working day.
Aiming to slow down these movements, in Britain the government enacted successive Factory Acts throughout the 19th century to regulate the work day. The working day was limited to fifteen hours, then twelve hours, and finally to ten hours in British law. Of course, those limits were never fully enforced—that wasn’t the point. If the very earliest hour limitations were sometimes imposed as a practical way to keep individual capitalists from wearing out the actual labor force too fast, the political aim was to divert the workers to look to the bourgeois state to defend their interests, rather than depending on their own organization and struggle.
In France, during the opening phases of the revolution of 1848, workers attempted to limit the working day to ten hours. But the law was repealed after the government crushed the workers’ insurrection a few months later. Eventually, a law was passed that limited the work day to 12 hours. But the law in France was also rarely enforced.
In the United States, too, the first recorded strikes were fights to reduce work hours. Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, the ten-hour day had become a general demand. In 1835, the Philadelphia general strike, the first general strike in North America, was led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, “From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals.”
But as Karl Marx observed, in the United States, “every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”
In August 1866, only one year after the end of the Civil War, the founding convention of the National Labor Union at Baltimore passed a resolution that stated, “The first and great necessity of the present to free labor of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is achieved.”
In some ways, this fight reached its height with the general strike for the eight-hour day that began on May 1, 1886. This general strike was called for by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which at the time was still a relatively small grouping of a few skilled trades unions. But the answer to their call went way beyond the AFL’s own forces to big numbers of unskilled workers, who were in the unions of the Knights of Labor. These unskilled workers went on strike, even though their own leaders opposed it. All told, about 350,000 workers went out on strike for the eight-hour day. Nearly 200,000 gained the eight-hour day. In Chicago, the center of the movement, 40,000 went out, paralyzing the city. Just the threat of going out ceded eight hours to another 45,000, who didn’t even go out. Tens of thousands joined unions prior to, and on that day, often with the perspective of enforcing the reduction in labor time that had been won.
The fight for shorter hours was always a tug of war between the working class and the capitalist class. After the general strike, the capitalists struck back hard against the strikers and the eight-hour movement in Chicago, where it had been centered. The strikers were vilified as “vipers,” “serpents,” and “foreign traitors” by the capitalists’ newspapers and their politicians. Hundreds of labor activists were rounded up. Eight of the top leaders, who were anarchists and revolutionaries, were convicted of murder and conspiracy charges in internationally publicized trials. Four of them were executed, while the others were given heavy prison sentences.
These blows set the workers’ movement back. But by 1888, the American Federation of Labor convention resolved to “enforce” eight hours by workers’ actions, setting May 1, 1890, as the day on which all work would halt after eight hours. The AFL said the demand was one around which “all can unite.” And, it’s true, the doors of some of these unions began to open beyond their usual narrowly defined craft. The movement itself created Eight-Hour Leagues, which organized huge rallies that pressed for the eight-hour day. During 1889, at least 971 such rallies were reported taking place in large and small cities throughout the country.
The fight to reduce the hours at work was a fight by workers for greater control over the fruits of their labor and over their lives and work. The question was how much time the workers had to spend under the control and dictates of the employers and how long the workers had for themselves, to lead their own lives. Shorter hours meant more time not just for leisure, sleep and family responsibilities, but more time for education and personal development, as well as political organization. The fight of when to work helped develop workers’ organizations at a time when very few existed in the country, and they became involved in fights to block speed-up and reduce the intensity of work.
The workers’ movement to reduce work hours unified workers across the lines of craft, race, sex, skill, age and ethnicity—and employment status. Because the demand for shorter hours promised to spread employment, the jobless also had a stake in the hours struggles. As Joseph Weydemeyer, the 19th-century German-American Marxist, observed, the movement for a shorter day “slings a common bond round all workingmen, awakens in them a common interest, pulls down the barriers too often raised between the different trades, [and declares] war against all prejudices of birth and color.”
In 1914, Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist leader and revolutionary, made a similar observation:“There is something in the shorter workday that appeals to every working man whether he belongs to a union or not, or whether he is class conscious or not, and it is something which gives ... power to the movement that ... fights to realize it for the workers,” said Debs.
For Weydemeyer and Debs, socialists and revolutionaries, working class unity went beyond the fight for shorter work hours and the improvement of workers’ health and lives in the constant tug of war between capital and labor. By uniting together as a class, the workers could finally free themselves from “capitalist slavery” and achieve their own emancipation.
The only unions that survived in the U.S. for any period of time, given the complete and virulent opposition of the capitalist class, were the more privileged skilled trades unions grouped in the AFL. But huge, militant strikes and mobilizations nonetheless broke out—by both skilled and unskilled workers, unionized and non-unionized workers—demanding shorter working hours. They were often led by militants, who considered themselves socialists, syndicalists, revolutionaries.
According to most estimates, the number of hours worked in the U.S. declined gradually but steadily over more than a century, from almost 70 hours per week on average in 1840 down to an average of about 50 hours per week by the 1920s. Of course, these gains were piecemeal, often local, uneven and not at all guaranteed or permanent, given the chaotic nature of capitalism, with its crises, depressions, wars and other disasters.
Most union leaders usually credit supposedly progressive politicians and paternalistic capitalists for helping to bring about these gains. Fawn and Sanders make a big point of this. They often cite Woodrow Wilson’s push for the Adamson Act, which legally fixed an eight-hour limit for hundreds of thousands of railroad employees in 1916. In fact, Wilson and Congress intervened in order to forestall a mass strike of 400,000 railroad workers. Even after Congress passed the law, it took another year of fights and threatened strikes for the workers to force the railroad companies to even begin to comply with the eight-hour-day law.
In reality, it was hard labor struggles that encompassed entire industries that imposed shorter hours on the capitalist class.
When the Great Depression of the 1930s hit, unemployment mushroomed to 25% of the workforce. Most of those still with jobs barely survived. The capitalists, out to protect themselves in the middle of the collapse, slashed workers’ wages over and over again, while drastically cutting the numbers working.
Militants began to put forward the demand for a 30-hour workweek, with those employed getting paid for 40 hours. The demand was not new. It had already been put forward in 1905, at the foundation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which declared its goal as the destruction of capitalist rule, to be replaced by the rule of the working class.
Faced with the growing unrest in the country, by the end of 1932, the American Federation of Labor unanimously made the 30-hour workweek, with no reduction in weekly wages, its key demand. But instead of proposing a massive general strike, as it had done in 1886, the AFL asked the workers it influenced to look to Congress to pass legislation to reduce the workweek.
The incoming Roosevelt administration, which had just won a sweeping victory at the polls, gaining the White House and big majorities in both houses of Congress, was more than happy to string the issue along. In April 1933 the U.S. Senate passed the Black-Connery bill by a wide margin. It was supposed to reduce the workweek to 30 hours. But not surprisingly, when the 30-hour bill went over to the House of Representatives for a vote, it was buried in a committee right after the National Association of Manufacturers and Roosevelt came out against it.
The demand of “30 for 40” did not die. A year later, in 1934, workers took it up when a major workers’ movement, marked by general strikes and factory occupations, broke out. This was not just a movement limited to one company or industry. Big parts of the working class throughout the country were on the move, sometimes to the point of open revolt.
Faced with this movement, the Roosevelt administration, representing the interests of the American bourgeoisie, threw some sops to the working class, attempting to divert it from its struggle.
Historically, the capitalist owners of the big industrial trusts and monopolies had strongly opposed unionization, especially of unskilled workers. However, the workers movement of the 1930s was so massive, it was creating those unions through the workers’ own self-organization and struggles. The Roosevelt administration moved to grant its supposed approval to the unions that the workers had already built and won. In 1935, Congress passed the Wagner Act, which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1937. The Wagner Act set up a new federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, that laid down the government’s rules that the workers were required to follow in order to gain legal authorization of their own union. Thus, it was the government that decided—and not the workers—whether there was a union or not. It was the government that decided who was in the union, how big the union could be. And it was the government that set the increasingly narrow conditions under which it would consider a strike as legal.
In other words, in return for the government’s stamp of approval, the workers’ union had to agree to submit to the authority of the state—the capitalists’ state. This was nothing but a trap set by the government to channel the workers struggles and organization into government-dictated practices in order to render the workers’ fights harmless to the capitalist class.
The Roosevelt administration also claimed to limit the workweek with the Fair Labor Standards Act. In 1938, the new law set the standard workweek at 44 hours, or 8.8 hours per day. Two years later, Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act, making the standard workweek 40 hours. This was supposed to be “a big step out of the jungle,” as the Administrator of the Fair Labor Standards Act put it.
But in reality, there was no limit to extra hours of work. It was a complete fiction. The federal standards only stipulated that after 40 hours, employers were required to pay time-and-a-half overtime. Employers immediately grabbed hold of this. Given the low wages employers paid, the real money kicked in for the workers only when they worked past 40 hours. For the companies it was win-win, because it was often cheaper to pay fewer workers overtime than to have to hire and train new workers.
After the law was passed, overtime skyrocketed as the U.S. economy geared up military production for World War II. In auto, for example, the 48-hour week became standard.
Of course, there is nothing surprising about the government’s maneuvers and traps. It’s what capitalist governments do. They defend the interests of the capitalist class. The problem for the workers was that the leadership of their own unions argued that these new laws were victories for the workers, that the workers had allies in the Roosevelt administration, that they were “friends of labor.” Almost immediately after the workers created these unions, the union bureaucrats tied the unions to the capitalist state.
In effect, these union bureaucracies were what the exiled Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, called, “transmission belts” of the capitalist class inside the working class, transmission belts that sought to control and contain the workers’ struggles. Under the leadership of these union bureaucracies, the demand of 30 for 40 slid to the back burner, and the number of hours in the average workweek stopped falling.
The 25 years that followed World War II are usually presented as a golden age of prosperity and rising living standards. And they were—for the capitalist class. But for the workforce, there was no reduction in the number of hours worked, even though workers continued to push for it. And, contrary to the way it is usually portrayed, U.S. companies continued to cut jobs during this so-called economic boom, through automation and decentralization of their industrial centers, not to speak of the periodic recessions that hit every few years. Detroit, for example, lost 100,000 industrial jobs in the 1950s. Layoffs were so chronic that people spent huge chunks of the 1950s trying to keep second and sometimes third jobs—fence installer, waitress, berry picker, golf caddy, cafeteria worker, taxi driver—to tide them over during the many layoffs. Other big industrial centers, such as New York City, Philadelphia and St. Louis, also lost comparable numbers of manufacturing jobs. The economic devastation that resulted from this “deindustrialization” was one of the major underlying causes for the urban rebellions that swept through the U.S. in the 1960s.
During this period, unionized workers gradually gained so-called “fringe benefits,” including vacations and retirement packages, which were supposed to reduce work time. But, as opposed to a shorter workweek, which could immediately have benefitted everyone, these benefits were tied to seniority. And more than anything, the increased privileges that came with higher seniority tied a solid part of the workers to their own employers. If the workers rocked the boat, if they were fired, they risked losing more than just their jobs—but everything they had accumulated over the years of work, starting with retirement benefits.
Certainly, the capitalist employers were forced to grant certain concessions to the workers as the result of the militancy and fights that the workers carried out. But, as the union bureaucracies cemented their partnerships with the employers, they gradually eroded the one way workers had made those gains, the workers’ own organization and struggle.
And so, even with chronic unemployment in the middle of the 20th century, American workers were still working more hours than peasants and artisans had worked in Europe during the Middle Ages before the advent of industrial capitalism, an indication of just how much the unions had been weakened by the officialdom at their head.
Starting in the early 1970s, the average workweek in the U.S. began to creep up. The “25 golden years” of economic growth that followed World War II had ended. Economic crisis, worsening recessions and stagnation set in, amidst one wave after another of plant closings and mass layoffs. Employers used the overhanging threat of unemployment to force the remaining workers to produce much more for much less—and to increase the hours of work.
Some employers simply demanded longer hours. They imposed increased overtime, while reducing rest periods, other paid time off, even vacations and paid days off. Increasing numbers of lower-wage workers were pushed into sweatshops with 19th-century working conditions.
This was aggravated by the fact that, as wages were stagnant in the face of inflation, or even began to be cut, individual workers attempted to maintain their standard of living—or simply put food on the table—by accepting more overtime, or working second or third jobs.
As the crisis took hold, this decline became very rapid. By the mid-1990s, production and non-supervisory employees, who make up 80% of the labor force, were working the equivalent of more than six extra weeks a year than they did in the early 1970s. As Sanders and Fain point out, work hours remain at extremely high levels today for most of the workforce.
Whatever gains workers made in the past through decades and decades of hard struggle and sacrifice are being wiped out. Under the capitalist system no gains are ever safe or permanent. Anything and everything that the workers produce is liable to be sacrificed on the altar of profit and enrichment of the capitalist class—and the amount of time workers gain for themselves has often been the first to be sacrificed.
In their article, Sanders and Fain proclaim that a much shorter workweek is possible under capitalism. To prove it, they cite other countries, including Belgium, France, Norway and Denmark, which in fact, are all rushing to catch up with what U.S. capitalism has imposed. They also cite top capitalists, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase. Both supposedly have predicted that advancements in technology could eventually lead to a three or three-and-a-half-day workweek.
The way to make these gains, according to both Fain and Sanders, is to get Congress to pass laws reducing the workweek. They refer to what Wilson did in 1916, and what Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. They even push the lie that in 1933 Congress came within a hair’s breadth of passing a law that would have reduced the official workweek to 30 hours, at 40 hours pay. (“And here is something I believe most people in our country do not know: In 1933, the United States Senate overwhelmingly passed legislation to establish a 30-hour workweek by a vote of 53–30. That was 1933,” Sanders told his Senate colleagues last March.)
In other words, Sanders and Fain repeat the same myths and lies touting supposedly labor friendly Democratic Party administrations, a myth that is universally accepted by union officials, academics and politicians. They present as the way forward the very same deadly traps that were used to pull the working class back from the kinds of mobilizations that not only were able to reduce work hours, but held out the possibility to get rid of the rule of the capitalists altogether.
More than one hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx recommended that conscious workers not exaggerate the result of the daily struggle to improve living conditions of existence. “They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” (Karl Marx, “Value, Price and Profit,” 1865).
Under capitalism, humanity made huge gains, not the least of which was the rapid expansion of its ability to produce, which was connected, in addition to the growth of technology and science, to the rapid increase in productivity of labor. Of course, this was accomplished using some of the most inhumane and barbaric methods in all history.
Nonetheless, under capitalism humanity has reached the threshold of being able to take new leaps in its potential. But humanity cannot cross that threshold under the continued grip of the capitalist class. The capitalist class’ drive for private profit at the expense of everything else has turned the world into a place “not fit for the living, only the dying,” as Leon Trotsky wrote as World War II raged in Europe and Asia.
Given the enormous increases in productivity of labor, increases that have multiplied many, many times just over the last decades, people should be able to work only a few hours a week—transforming completely the nature of work from what it currently is under capitalism, just as capitalism transformed the nature of work in radically other ways from earlier economic systems. The burden of long work hours, coupled with ever harsher drives to produce more, could be relieved for everyone. And this could mean that everyone would have the time “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, raise cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner [...] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic,” as Karl Marx wrote. In other words, they will not be tied to work for most of their lives, producing the profits and wealth for the capitalist class. Instead all people will be able to lead much richer and fuller lives.
What makes that impossible today is not human nature or greed, the usual explanations that we all hear, but the fact that the economy and the society are under the control of the capitalist class, that is, a tiny minority of the population, for its own profit and wealth. The historic mission of the working class is to take that power and control away. Certainly, the working class, at the center of the world economy, is in a position to do just that. The working class already produces everything and makes everything run. But it must control and organize the economy it sits at the center of, and to do that it has to rip power away from the capitalist class—through the same kind of social movements that in capitalism’s early years drove down hours of work. The workers cannot stop short of that final step of overthrowing the power of the capitalist class.