Shorter Hours as a Response to Industrialization

Abstract

Although shorter hours was one of the major demands of the American labor movement in the late nineteenth century, it has received surprisingly little attention from historians. This essay discusses the ideology of the movement for shorter hours. It goes beyond the well-known work of Ira Steward in the 1860’s to examine an important but little known body of theory in the late 1870’s and 1880’s. Special attention is given to the work of John Davis and W. Godwin Moody. It was Moody who offered the first complete analysis of the relationship among mechanization, unemployment, consumption and the hours of labor. He most fully expressed the labor movement’s belief that shorter hours was the most important tool for combatting the negative effects of industrial change. Moody claimed that unregulated mechanization displaced workers and increased unemployment. This in turn reduced consumption and destroyed the essential balance between what was produced and what could be sold. The eventual result was overproduction and recurrent depressions. The mechanism for harmonizing technological progress and the needs of society was shorter hours. The theory of shorter hours attacked several fundamental elements of American industrial capitalism; in exchange, it offered the basic principle that unrestrained economic growth must be curbed and made compatible with the needs of society. This concept ultimately became one of the major ideological bases for the American welfare state of the twentieth century.