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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, p.31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Working Hours in British Industry: An Economic History
M.A. Bienefeld
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £5.
CHANGES IN the hours of work are an important and much neglected area of British Labour history. Bienefeld attempts in this book both an account and an explanation of such changes. How successful is he?
His account commences in 1300 and ends in 1965 – most space being devoted to the period after 1820. The book is rather lacking in detail and narrow in scope: when Bienefeld says in the introduction ‘This study is about the working hours of the British industrial workman’, he means exactly that – non-industrial occupations such as agriculture, trasnport and domestic services are not dealt with, nor are the problems peculiar to women and children. It is nevertheless quite a useful summary.
What is clearly shown is that since the industrial revolution at least, standard working hours have moved in a quite different way from wages. Thus, while wages have fluctuated both up and down, standard hours have stayed constant for years on end and have with minor exceptions never moved up, only down; the last four downward bumps being in 1872, 1919, 1947 and 1959-65.
Why has this been the case? In attempting an answer the author is hampered in at least two ways. First, he does not really deal with overtime. Admittedly this is a different subject to investigate, but without such investigation the real significance of drops in the standard working week cannot be porperly evaluated. Secondly he tends to look at the world through blinkers of academic economic theory. Hence he gets tied up in pages of algerbra and indifference curves just to ‘prove’ the simple logical point that if wages move more often than standard hours this must be because employers and/or unions are less willing to negotiate about the latter than the former.
He can seriously discuss why hours were reduced in 1919 without noticing that in that year class conflict was at its highest peak so far this century and hundreds of thousands of workers had their eyes on the bakehouse rather than on more crumbs. He is always looking for abstract ‘economic forces’ rather than searching out what real bosses and workers actually said and did.
But hidden amongst the suffocating jungle of economic orthodoxy are one or two useful points, notably Bienefeld’s highlighting of the paradox that it is when workers most need reductions in the standard working week (in periods of unemployment they have least power to do so), and it is when employers have the greatest opportunity to extend hours (again, in periods of unemployment) that they have the least incentive to do so. Hence standard hours seem only to drop, not rise.
This leads the author to the conclusion that the best time to press for a reduction of hours is duirng a boom when workers still have memories of unemployment fresh on their minds. If this is true, the fight for the 35 hour week could really begin in earnest in the near future.
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