Hellraisers Journal: Fight for Eight Hour Day: from Haymarket Martyrs of 1887 to Railroad Workers of 1916

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hellraisers Journal: Sunday November 5, 1916
From the International Socialist Review: The Eight-Hour Day

“Lest We Forget” by Robert Minor

Militant on the Adamson Law:

POLITICS AND PEOPLE

THE eight-hour day has jumped from the dusty obscurity of text books and libraries and forgotten platforms of politics and labor into a new life, into one of the leading issues talked and thought across the nation.

Thirty years ago the Knights of Labor waged a long campaign that came to a finish about the time of the Chicago Haymarket affair and the eight-hour day was the chief demand and the focal point of the agitation and education of the working class of that period.

Then the eight-hour day as a big issue slept and slumbered and was not.

And this pleased the exploiters of labor. Once labor is organized there are no issues, such as higher wages, restriction of output, adjustment of personal grievances, so disturbing to employers as the eight-hour day issue.

So they have been glad, the exploiters, that this issue has been kept down, that eight hours’ work, eight hours’ recreation and eight hours’ sleep as the proper division of the American proletarians’ workday, has not been in the national talk and thought.

Now this is changed. Now country-wide, in city saloons and wilderness cabins, in the mine sheds and the railroad shanties, they are talking about this eight-hour day deal as they formerly talked tariff and free silver and imperialism.

Schwab, Gary, Morgan—they don’t like it. Otis, Shonts, Wool Trust Wood and all exploiters from Lawrence to Mesaba Range and Los Angeles—they don’t like it.

Eight-hour workday once granted is harder to take away than any other concession labor wrings from capital.

What eight hours’ work in twenty-four means is so simple, clear and specific that no lawyers, glib gabbyjacks hired for skill in tergiversation, can come in and make black white or white black.

Eight hours’ work means eight hours’ work and there is no going behind the returns.

A wage raise dependent on this and that interpretation, contingent on this and that condition, is often defeated by the cunning employer.

Always, too, the capitalist class with its power of fixing prices can raise the cash cost of life necessities so as to take away thru higher prices all that has been conceded in higher wages.

Not so with the eight-hour workday. Once granted it stays.

The standardized short workday is not defeated in its workings as the standardized higher wage so often is.

How the Adamson law is going to work out is one of the puzzles of history waiting an answer.

If Hughes is elected the Adamson law will get a big hole kicked in it at the start because The Whiskers is already committed to defeat its workings under the theory that it was “legislation under duress.”

If Wilson is elected there will be one of the most interesting struggles between the government, political and military, of this nation, and the industrial autocracy of this nation which has never in recent years lost any battle involving issues as vast as that of the Adamson law.