Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [784]
THE EIGHT-HOUR DAY
Another labor objective—one that inspired much stiffer resistance from employers—was to cut the working day from ten to fourteen hours down to eight. In May 1865 the Workingmen’s Union launched the eight-hour campaign with a monster picnic in Jones’ Wood attended by fifty thousand. In December a packed mass meeting of over fifty unions at Cooper Institute turned thousands away. The following April an immense rally jammed Union Square.
Speakers at these events—men like Brooklynite William Harding, president of the coachmakers-i-argued that an eight-hour day would ease the crushing workload that made laborers slaves to their jobs. “Labor-saving” machines should start saving labor, rather than just increasing profits. Eight hours for work and eight for sleep would leave eight more in which to develop their human capacities, to be with their families, to get some fun out of life. The working class should get to enjoy the pleasures of the city. There was, Harding reminded his audiences, a fine picture gallery in the Cooper Institute, but not one in twenty workingmen had time to see it. A band gave concerts in Central Park, but artisans hadn’t time to hear it. “Should it not,” he asked, “play for the mechanics in this republic as well as for the millionaire?” Shorter hours would make it feasible for workers to live farther away from their jobs and escape the tenement districts. Shorter hours would cut unemployment, by requiring more workers to maintain existing production levels. Shorter hours would ward off depressions, by boosting wages and increasing purchasing power.
Moving beyond speechmaking, the Workingmen’s Union petitioned New York State to pass an eight-hour law In April 1866 shipyard workers at the Greenpoint yards launched a strike for the eight-hour day. It was broken, but the sounds of labor’s growing militancy were heard up in Albany. State legislators disagreed on how to respond. The ruling Radical Republicans had demonstrated, in the cases of the fire department and the Board of Health, that they were prepared to use government to redress social ills. They liked the eight-hour issue’s potential to attract Democratic workmen to their party. They appreciated the argument that laborers would use the extra time to improve their character as citizens and workers.
But Radicals worried about intervening in capital-labor relations. The idea went beyond guaranteeing the equality of individuals and smacked of “class legislation,” which might open the door to more extreme proposals. Some lawmakers were convinced that workers would use their leisure time to drink themselves into a stupor. Others argued that hours legislation violated both the “natural law” of supply and demand and the “liberty” of the worker. “This is a free country,” said one Republican, “and everybody ought to be allowed to work just as long as he pleases.”
They settled on a spurious compromise, embodied in the Eight Hour Law of April 1867. The legislation set eight hours as the legal length of a working day but allowed longer workdays if arranged by “mutual consent.” If a laborer worked “overtime,” moreover, he or she was not entitled to extra compensation. Nor did the state create an administrative agency to monitor compliance. Employers ignored the law.
Unions decided to enforce it on their own. At the beginning of the 1868 construction season, over two thousand bricklayers struck for a 20 percent reduction of hours (from ten to eight), to be partly offset by a 10 percent cut in