Eight Hours for Work

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Macmillan, 1894 - Eight-hour movement - 340 pages
 

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Page 38 - ... years ago), my firm was working under great pressure twelve hours a day. Shortly afterwards the Factory Acts were applied to Birmingham, and we reduced the hours to ten a day. Some time later we voluntarily reduced the hours to nine a day, after the experiment at Newcastle of a nine hours engineers
Page 306 - ... consequence of the value set on his labour. Provided he does not drink, you can get as good a day's work out of him as at home. He will pick his time as to when he will do your job, and hesitate whether he will do it at all; but having once started on it, he generally does his best for you. Too often the sudden increase of wages is too much for his mental equilibrium, and a man who was sober enough as a poor man at home, finds no better use for his loose cash than to put it into the public-house...
Page 319 - I conceive that the State is justified in ' passing any law, or even in doing any single act which, without ulterior consequences, adds to the sum total of happiness.
Page 277 - That in the opinion of this House it is desirable that all future contracts should be let on the understanding that eight hours should be considered the term of the day's work.
Page viii - I attribute the full maintenance of our production through the trial year solely to the unimpaired and cheerful energy on the part of every man and boy throughout the day. We seem to have been working in harmony with a natural law, instead of against it.
Page 11 - Macmillan, 1894. But for the last 60 years we have been slowly learning the lesson that all this successive prolongation of working hours, which was near eating the heart out of the labouring manhood of England, was also, from the standpoint of the manufacturers' own interest, a grave pecuniary mistake.
Page 295 - Much of that result flows, no doubt, from better management on the part of the employers and other general causes of progress, but much of it also undoubtedly arises from an improvement in the industrial efficiency of the artizans themselves, the direct effect of the leisure they have acquired. It is almost a universal opinion in the colony that the men work harder now while they are at their work, and that they turn out work of a better quality than they did under the long-hour system. Mr. Hodgkinson,...
Page 38 - ... to the number of hours worked; What is the fact? When we reduced the hours from twelve to ten — a reduction of 17 per cent. — the reduction in the production was about 8 per cent. When we again reduced the hours from ten to nine — a reduction of 10 per cent. — the reduction of production was 5 per cent.
Page 23 - This is accounted for, partly by the increased stimulus given to ingenuity to make the machinery more perfect and capable of increased speed, but it arises far more from the workpeople, by improved health, by absence of that weariness and exhaustion which the long hours occasioned, and by their increased cheerfulness and activity, being enabled to work more steadily and diligently, and...

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