Theme about May Day and the fight for the 8-hour workday
Since 1889, May Day has been the labor movement’s annual celebration of the struggle for the political and trade union rights of the working class. The first May Day rally in Denmark was held in a number of provincial towns and in Fælledparken in Copenhagen in 1890.
At the time, many workers worked 10-14 hours a day under poor conditions, and the demand for “8 hours work, 8 hours leisure and 8 hours rest” became a unifying slogan for the movement.
The struggle over working hours is one of the most fundamental expressions of the antagonism between workers and employers and is as old as wage labor and capitalism itself.
An important struggle
There are several reasons why the 8-hour struggle is so strong in the collective memory of the labor movement. There are several reasons why the 8-hour struggle is so strong in the collective memory of the labor movement. Firstly, the story of how the demand for an 8-hour working day was raised in the first place. Partly the many years of struggle, and partly the aesthetics of the struggle. The three 8s – 8 hours work, 8 hours freedom, 8 hours rest – in various configurations and patterns are iconic. Then there is the history of the internal contradictions of the labor movement between direct action and negotiation, between revolution and reformism. These contradictions played a crucial role in the process leading up to the introduction of the 8-hour workday. Why was the 8-hour day implemented at that particular time? Whose honor was it that after so many years the 8-hour day was brought to victory?
The demand for an 8-hour workday can be traced back to the 1840s and 1850s, when English workers who had emigrated to New Zealand and Australia raised the issue. In Denmark, it can be traced to the 1870s, when working hours were around 11 hours a day, six days a week. In 1879, the board of the Carpenters’ and Chairmakers’ Union, in collaboration with the later chairman of the Social Democratic Party, P. Knudsen, wrote a petition to the Danish Parliament requesting the introduction of a statutory 8-hour working day.
However, the later iconic 8-hour struggle found its direct inspiration in North America, where labor organizations raised the demand in earnest during the 1880s. Workers in the United States and Canada decided to make May 1 a joint demonstration day for the 8-hour demand. In 1889, representatives of the American workers attended the labor congresses in Paris, where the 2. International was established. They brought the idea of May Day with them, and their European brothers took it to heart. May Day was thus founded as an international day of struggle where workers all over the world raised the demand for 8 hours work, 8 hours freedom and 8 hours rest.
The credit goes to ….
“The honor of having implemented the 8-hour day was not given to the three construction trades, and we do not covet it either. Let only others adorn themselves with borrowed feathers, it is enough for us that the 8-hour day is now a fact – the struggle has been for the three construction trades, the honor for the cooperating unions. In this way, sun and wind have been shared equally”
So wrote Christian Rassow at the end of May 1919, shortly after the Cooperating Trade Unions and the Confederation of Danish Employers had signed the collective agreement that introduced the 8-hour day. Rassow was chairman of the Bricklayers’ Union of 1919 for Copenhagen and the surrounding area, and he was a key figure in the struggle of the building trades that he mentions. The struggle began in the spring of 1918.
Despite Denmark’s neutrality, 1. World War I hit the Danish working class hard. The war resulted in reduced export revenues, limited imports and rising prices for goods. The population was subject to rationing, real wages fell and unemployment soared in the final years of the war. During the war, the Social Democratic Party pursued the so-called civil peace policy. This meant that the party abandoned anti-militarism, voted for the Finance Act and, in 1916, went into government for the first time with Thorvald Stauning as ‘minister without portfolio’.
This development gave rise to a strengthening of the revolutionary part of the labor movement in Denmark, and with the revolutionary wave that swept across Europe in 1917-18, there was plenty of inspiration to draw from outside.
A team of bricklayers photographed probably sometime in the 1910s
The bricklayers – among others – negotiated decent wage increases through collective agreements in 1918, but they couldn’t match the skyrocketing prices of goods, so the workers were on a level playing field and working hours were still high – 10 hours a day, Saturday 9 hours. So construction workers, led by journeymen bricklayers, began campaigning for shorter working hours. The inspiration came from the so-called ‘English week’ with weekends starting at 12 noon on Saturday instead of 17:00. When the employers delayed the negotiation process, the construction workers took matters into their own hands and started going home at 12 noon on Saturday.
The issue of working hours rose to the top of the agenda during 1918, and in the spring of 1919, the Confederation of Danish Trade Unions and the Danish Employers’ Association began collective bargaining and agreed to introduce an 8-hour working day.
Still a 48-hour work week
With the introduction of the 8-hour working day in 1919, a major goal for the labor movement was achieved. But the battle for time did not end. As early as 1922, employers terminated the 1919 collective agreement and tried to roll back the 8-hour day. However, they were unsuccessful and the 8-hour day and 48-hour work week remained in place for many years. It wasn’t until the 1950s that working hours really came back on the agenda. By then, the wave of rationalization had already taken hold – workers had to produce more in less time. 1956’s Great Conflict was largely about working hours. The unions demanded 44 hours a week. They didn’t get it when the Social Democratic government elevated the rejected settlement proposal to law. It wasn’t until 1958 that working hours fell below 48 hours per week, and it wasn’t until 1966 that the trade union movement achieved 44 hours after gradual reductions in working hours. 37 hours no law of nature.
37 hours is not a law of nature
The trend of gradually reducing working hours continued throughout the 1970s, and in the mid-1980s the trade union movement made a big push for a 35-hour working week. One of the main slogans was;
“Time for more, jobs for more”
The major conflict in 1985, where 35 hours was one of the main demands of the trade union movement, ended with intervention from the conservative government, and they had to settle for a reduction to 39 hours a week. In the late 1980s, the weekly working hours were further reduced, and in 1990 they ended up at the 37 hours we are used to today.
Poster on scaffolding in Hvidovre
But even though the 37-hour work week has been in place for almost as long as the 48-hour work week, history both before and after 1990 shows that a 37-hour work week is certainly not a given. In 2010, for example, the Social Democrats and SF launched the Fair Solution proposal, which included raising working hours by one hour a week through tripartite negotiations – or 12 minutes a day, as they put it.
However, the two parties that formed a government with the Social Liberal Party in 2011 had to abandon the idea of extending working hours as there was no parliamentary basis for the proposed plan, but as recently as the 2017 collective bargaining negotiations in the private sector, the working time rules were changed. The agreement gave employers the right to introduce so-called “systematic overtime”, which means they can introduce a 42-hour working week in selected weeks.
Today, normal working hours are still 37 hours per week. But the battle for time will resurface and the question is whether we should work more or less.
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