A persistent myth on the left is that it was the unions that were responsible for workers being given the weekend off. After all, if it wasn’t for the class struggle of early unionists, why would the capitalists have ever given in to worker demands of increased leisure time? If it wasn’t for them, would we not still be slaving away, 12 hours a day, six days a week? The truth is: we would not. It IS a myth. Wealth came first, and then the unions certainly played a role – but it was that of fighting for the workers when that wealth was distributed.
The industrial revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had seen a transition from manual production methods to the employment of machines in Europe and the US. Suddenly, workers were much more productive; now the simple act of pulling a lever could do what several men had been needed to do before. And this is what achieved the emancipation of the working classes: the accumulation of enough capital and technological knowledge to increase their productivity. Once workers were given access to these, their capacity to produce was massively increased – and with it, their relative wages rose: goods fell in price relative to human capital, and a virtuous circle was created where an ever-diminishing cost of non-human factors of production led to ever-increasing real wages. It’s been going on ever since.
Much of the early new-found wealth of the working classes was spent on improving living conditions, but leisure time soon also came in demand. In Britain, the Eight Hour League was formed in 1884, and succeeded in making the trade unions adopt the eight-hour day as a core objective in their struggle for workers’ rights, though it has never quite materialised: Britain has a 48-hour work week, one of the longest in the developed world. In the US, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees in 1868, and by the 1930ies, the basic 40 hours work week was realised for most American workers, though many still work much longer than that – because they want to.
Since then, in most countries the increased productivity has manifested itself in higher real-wages and increased living standards, rather than increased time off – though things like maternity leave and other non-pay conditions have also been in demand. But those who complain that we work harder than ever would do well to remember that they could take a lot more time off if they were content to live a lifestyle as they did just 50 years ago. Without the need for funds to buy iPhones, foreign holidays, modern cars, designer clothes etc., there would not be the need to work nearly as hard as many do today to keep up with the trappings of 21st century living.
Outside the western world, however, most people don’t enjoy an 8-hour working day, a five-day week and six weeks paid holiday. But they lack more than for labour to be unionised to achieve it. Without sufficient capital, just surviving takes all the hours in the day. In many places, even children are sent out to work for families to make ends meet. People in the third word today, just like those in Europe and the US before and during the industrial revolution, work long hours in bad conditions because they must. The caricature of the evil capitalist oppressing them is popular on the left, but it misses the point completely. It wasn’t the unions fighting fat cat bosses that gave us the weekend. It was capitalism.