If the working day were reduced to eight hours, say the defenders of this reform, it would diminish the periods of enforced idleness which result from overproduction; everybody would work, and the workers would be enabled to increase their wages in consequence. At first sight this reasoning seems logical, but nothing can be falser to him who has thoroughly considered the phenomena engendered by the vicious organization which today is by courtesy called society. In the chapter on property we have shown that if the stores are glutted with products it is not because production is too great but because the majority of the producers are reduced to poverty and cannot consume according to their needs. The most logical means therefore for the laborer to secure work for himself would be to take possession of the products he has created and of which he has been cheated, and consume them. We will expatiate no further in this direction; it remains to us to show that the application of the proposed reform would not bring the slightest pecuniary advantage to the workers.
When a capitalist invests his capital in some industry he does so because he hopes thereby to make it fruitful. Now, in the present conditions the employer calculates that he must have the workman ten, eleven, or twelve hours, in order to get out of him the estimated profit. Reduce the working day to eight hours and the employer will find himself injured, his calculations upset; but as his capital must bring him in so much percent, (his special labor as a capitalist consisting of getting his profit—buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market possible—in short robbing all those with whom he has dealings—such being his business) he will hunt up some new device to reimburse himself for what it has been endeavored to take away from him. Three ways will present themselves to him: to increase the price of his products, to reduce the wages of his workmen, or to make them produce in eight hours the same amount they now do in twelve. The promoters of the reform have guarded against one of these by asking for the fixing of a minimum wage. It is not likely that the employers would resort to an increase in the price of goods, embarrassed as they are by competition; at any rate the dearness of the cost of living keeping pace with the rise of wages proves to us that it would not be long before the worker carried all the burdens of the reform; and though his present daily wages were maintained for the eight-hour day he would be still poorer than now, for the increase in the price of articles of consumption would make his wages actually less. Have not North and South America shown us that wherever the workman has succeeded in getting higher wages, articles of consumption have increased proportionately? And wherever he has succeeded in making twenty francs a day he needs twenty-five to live after the style a workman getting a good living is supposed to live, so that he has always remained in the same place.
But in these days of steam and electricity competition does not permit delay; one must produce “quick and cheap.” It will not, then, be by increasing the price of their goods that the exploiters will try to “catch up.” The last method, that of producing in eight hours what is now produced in twelve is the one always pointed out to the exploiters anxious to keep their profits intact. The workman must therefore produce faster; consequently the encumbering of the market with products which the reform is intended to prevent, the periods of idleness sought to be avoided, would recur just as before, since production would remain the same and the worker would not have been put in a position to consume more.
But the inconveniences of the so-called improvement would not be limited to this failure alone; there would be others more serious. First, the reduction of the working day would have the effect of stimulating the perfection of mechanical appliances and hastening the displacement of the workman of flesh by the workman of iron, which in a well-organized society would be progress, but would be found to be an aggravation of misery to the worker in our present society. Moreover, being compelled to produce faster the workman would consequently be obliged to accelerate all his movements, to concentrate his attention more and more upon his work; all his energies would thus be in a state of continual tension more injurious to his health than longer hours of work. The time is shorter, but being bound to expend more strength in less time he would become fatigued more and more rapidly. If we consider England, which is given as an example by the partisans of this project, and where the nine-hour day is in operation, we shall see that far from being an improvement the shorter day is on the contrary an aggravation to the workers. It is to Karl Marx, the oracle of those who put forward this fine scheme, that we turn for proofs to support our assertion. For instance if we open Marx’s Capital we find, on page 105, this extract from the report of a factory inspector:
“ ‘To maintain the quantity of our products,’ says the firm of Cochrane, British Pottery, Glasgow, ‘we have had recourse to the usage, on a large scale, of machines which render skilled workmen superfluous, and every day demonstrates that we can produce much more than by the old method. The nine-hour factory
