A Quest for Time

A Quest for Time The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 Gary Cross UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1989 H D University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1989 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cross, Gary S. A quest for time. Includes index. 1. Hours of labor—Great Britain—History. 2. Hours of labor—France—History. I. Title. HD5165.C76 1989 331.25'72'0941 88-27839 ISBN 0-520-06532-8 (alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America Acknowledgments of passages published elsewhere: “The Quest for Leisure: Reassessing the Eight-Hour Day in France,” Journal of Social History 18 (Winter 1984): 195-216. Revised. Reprinted by permission. “Les Trois Huit: International Reform, Labor Movements, and the Eight-Hour Day, 1919—1924,” French Historical Studies 14 (Fall 1985): 240-68. Reprinted by permission. “Worktime in International Discontinuity, 1886-1940,” in Worktime and Industrialization: An International History, ed. Gary Cross (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 155-81, © 1988 by Temple University. Reprinted by permission. Contents PREFACE vil ABBREVIATIONS xi 1. A Question of Time 1 2. Policing Time: The Nineteenth-Century State and Working Hours 21 3. Challenging the Liberal Economy of Time, 1886-1912 52 4. Family Time and Consumption Time: Shop Hours and the Origins of the Weekend 79 5. Efficiency and Reform: Work Science, the State, and Time, 1890- 1918 103 6. Labor Insurgency, international Reform, and the Origins of the Eight-Hour Day, 1917-1924 129 VI Contents 7. Worktime, Growth, and an International Labor Standard 150 8. Meanings of Free Time: Leisure and Class in the 1920s 171 9. Labor and Rationalization 194 10. The Right to Time in the Twentieth Century 215 appendix 233 notes 237 index 323 Preface Like many novice labor historians during the early 1970s, I was intrigued by the origins and fate of politically conscious labor in the upheaval ol nineteenth-century industrialization. Perhaps a major¬ ity of my peers focused on the formation of industrial working classes up to World War I. I was one of those who looked for an explanation of why and how these labor movements changed—especially by an appar¬ ent narrowing of perspective—in response to the rationalized econo¬ mies of the twentieth century. The result was a seminar paper, and the research on that project was the beginning of this book. In my paper, I attempted to address an old question—the decline of the ideals of workers’ control in France after 1914. After finding the po¬ litical and ideological approaches of institutional histories insufficient, I shifted to the presumably firmer ground of technological change to ex¬ plain the decline of revolutionary labor and came to a rather conven¬ tional conclusion: in the face of managerial and mechanical assaults on skill-based work, French labor had little choice but to embrace the cor- poratist formulas of reformism or the bread-and-butter economism of communism. Soon I dropped the topic to pursue the same general problem from a different angle—the impact of immigration on the shifting of the French working class in a conservative direction. Yet I never was satisfied with this approach. After about ten years of tilling on the margins of the field in immigration history, I decided to give my first topic a second look. I had been dissatisfied for some time with several dominant trends in labor history: the search for autono- viii Preface mous working-class cultures at the price of neglecting the political con¬ test and the tendency to view twentieth-century labor reformism as an inevitable product of modernization or of false consciousness and un¬ heroic compromise. As the Western nations drifted toward the Right in the 1970s, the key historical question appeared less the fate of revolu¬ tionary challenges to capitalism than when and how democratic reforms could penetrate the social order. I also came to sec that my earlier approach neglected the significance oi life beyond the workplace. The new history of gender, family, and even leisure, which surely has put traditional labor history in a shadow since the mid-1970s, seemed to offer fresh approaches to the labor question. I might have undertaken a community historical study, an ap¬ proach that has served well to elucidate the foil dimensions of class and culture. But I remained convinced that questions of class in relationship to the state had yet to be folly explored and that these issues required a national—and, indeed, international—perspective. It was clear, how¬ ever, that work was an insufficient unit of analysis and that reform had to be understood in the broad context of leisure and family as well. In particular, reflecting on my early work, I was struck by the almost obsessive interest that labor had in the interwar period with the reform of worktime—especially the eight-hour day and the claim to it as a right of citizenship. I found in this concern with working hours a new significance. It was not a consolation prize in a lost contest over the character of industrial society but an expression of a far deeper quest for time. The eight-hour day was surely central to the postwar debate over the shape of the French economy and society. It occurred to me that an investigation of worktime might serve as a prism through which to look at this critical transformation of labor in a new light. The issue was not merely the reduction of working hours but the reallocation of time, a shift that affected life beyond employment as much as the experience of work. I hoped to find in this quest for time a way of linking the radi¬ calism of labor history before World War I with the reformism that fol¬ lowed and of relating changes in work with shifting attitudes toward family and leisure. I stirred up more dust than I could realistically settle in one book, but it seemed worthwhile to press on. The fact that a movement for shorter working hours was one of few fresh fronts on which European labor moved in the late 1970s and 1980s made the historical experience of this movement even more significant. And because of the difficulties that these struggles have encountered, a long view of the problems of reform became all the more useful. Preface IX I dug at the stump of this old tree, uncovering roots that were rather deeper and more extensive than at first expected. Perhaps most impor¬ tant, I found that an investigation of the French short-hours movement was insufficient. Not only was the quest for time an international move¬ ment at almost every stage, but its transnational character was essential for its success. Moreover, by looking in detail at another country, I could break out of the ghetto of national (and particularly French) la¬ bor history and address a wider audience. I chose Britain because it was arguably the birthplace of the short-hours movement and provided its most important literature until at least the early 1890s. The result is this book. Its occasional polemical bark is as much di¬ rected toward the ghost of my earlier thoughts as it is toward those of contemporary scholars. I hope readers will find that this work grows from the concerns of the last generation of labor history and is not merely a reaction to them. The book focuses on the politics of work¬ time, and only secondarily on its culture or economics. Still by “poli¬ tics” I mean more than a study of labor legislation and collective bar¬ gaining—although these areas are important and far too long neglected by social and labor historians. The question of worktime reform is un¬ answerable without analysis of the ideological struggle over the political economy of time, changing attitudes toward work and leisure, and the broad economic context. I owe a great deal to many who broadened my perspective on this topic. Among the people who gave me their time and ideas are Clive Behagg, Julian Jackson, Karl Hinrichs, Teresa Murphy, David Roedigcr, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Irmgard Steinisch, and Robert Sykes. Each of these people share with me an interest in the historical problem of worktime and have made important contributions to this question. Conversation and correspondence with them has sharpened my focus and extended my view. Other scholars, who for the most part also have done work in this field, have also critically read parts or all of the text. They gave me a hand when I was skating on thin ice. These include David Brody, Gerald Eggert, Steve Fraser, John Horner, Benjamin Hunnicutt, Lucien Karstens, Wassily Leontief, Wayne Lewchuk, Anson Rabinbach, Martha Shields, Dan Silverman, Carmen Sirianni, Stewart Weaver, and Lee Shai Weisbach. I owe much to Harvey Goldberg, who seventeen years ago led that seminar that set me on the track of this subject; despite the likelihood that he might well have disagreed with a good deal of my argument, I think he would have seen some of himself in the results. James E. Cronin not only gave generously of his time in assuaging my various X Preface anxieties but also offered invaluable aid to this French historian trying to find his way into the thicket of British social history. The financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Insti¬ tute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at the Pennsylvania State Uni¬ versity was much appreciated. Finally, Maru Cross has contributed more to this project than I can express.

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