Eight-hour Workday Research Articles

Breastfeeding in the Workplace: What's Wrong with the Right?

There are two main differences between the Philippine and American statutes that promote breastfeeding. First, the Philippine law provides that lactation breaks should be compensated while the American law does not. Second, the Philippine law provides for “culturally appropriate lactation care and services” whereas majority of American states exempt breastfeeding from public indecency laws.Accommodating the need of a nursing employee to take regular breaks to express breast milk is appropriate but giving her full pay while clearly not engaged in her usual duties is undoubtedly the very kind of special treatment that paves the way to animosity not only between employer and employee but also among co-employees. Forty minutes of paid lactation break for every eight-hour working day translates to about twenty-two days of paid leave each year. This is certainly no joke for small and medium-sized business enterprises. On this basis alone, employers already have a good reason to discriminate against the hiring of female employees of child-bearing age.Along the same vein, resentment might also arise among the nursing employee’s co-workers because of possible perception of unfair special treatment. This can be especially true for women who do not breastfeed, whether by choice or by necessity. It is a difficult proposition to advance that a single father, an adoptive mother, or a biological mother who is suffering from a medical condition that precludes her from breastfeeding, might need to work overtime to earn extra income to purchase expensive infant formula while a nursing mother protected under this law receives her regular income even when she is not performing her usual occupational duties. In the end, the privilege can result in subtle discrimination against a nursing employee because of the perception that her family duties are getting in the way of her job performance, and, she even gets paid for it.Finally, the statutory grant of paid lactation breaks might be hovering around excessive government endorsement of breastfeeding to the point of casting stigma on women who cannot or do not want to breastfeed. The bottom line is that breastfeeding should purely be a woman’s choice that must be accorded due respect regardless of whether her decision is to engage or not to engage in such activity, and regardless of her reason, or even the lack of it, behind either decision. Breastfeeding is still an imposition upon a woman’s body, a servitude that cannot be required against her consent. Some, but definitely not all women, may opt to breastfeed their infant, hence, it is enough that we provide the opportunity to express and store breast milk for those who have the capacity and the desire to do the same. However, we should not go further towards discrediting those who cannot or do not.

Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (review)

Reviewed by: Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction by John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov Theodore J. Karamanski (bio) Chicago in the Age of Capital: Class, Politics, and Democracy during the Civil War and Reconstruction. By John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 310. Cloth, $55.00.) During the last twenty years the boundaries of Reconstruction-era historiography have expanded well beyond the states of the defeated Confederacy. This change has flowed from the recognition that federal policies in the South were inexorably linked to political support in the North and the realization that the trauma of Civil War had repercussions throughout American culture and society. As a result, the cast of characters in the Reconstruction drama has expanded greatly from the familiar struggling black freedpeople and resistant white landowners to include Indians battling reservation confinement, grasping urban industrialists, beleaguered western farmers, and an urban working class trying to adjust to the revolutionary changes the Civil War brought to the American economy. It is to this latter group that John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov turn their attention in a detailed local study that adds much nuance to our understanding of the Reconstruction era in the urban North. The Civil War dramatically affected Chicago. Although it was located far from the battle lines, the city, which was already a leading commercial center, was transformed by the war into an industrial powerhouse. During the decade of the 1860s the city population more than doubled and the number of factories tripled. The famous Union Stock Yards were opened and Chicago foundries rolled the first steel rail made in the United States. Production for the operation and expansion of the nation’s growing railroad network played a large role in the transformation of the city’s economy and the experience of work in Chicago. At the heart of Jentz and Schneirov’s study is the story of how workers and capitalists struggled to adjust their actions and ideology to the conditions of an industrial workplace that became by necessity larger and more impersonal. The authors focus on what they call the “wage-labor question” from the late 1850s through the 1870s. They contend that the Emancipation Proclamation sparked a shift in working-class political alignments in Chicago. The old “free (white) labor” ideology lost relevance once slavery was to be ended and the workplace industrialized. Jentz and Schneirov argue that a new labor coalition emerged, made up of former Democratic Irish, Republican German, and Anglo-American workers united under an ideology they call “transnational social republicanism” (4). For a time the alliance identified with the liberalism of the Republican Party, but this political association began to erode with the 1867 strike for [End Page 425] an eight-hour workday and the rise of the probusiness stalwarts in party circles. However, it was the depression that began in 1873 and continued until 1878 that caused the complete defection of northern labor from the Republican coalition. In this finding Jentz and Schneirov disagree with historian David Montgomery’s pathbreaking argument in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) and support the broad analysis of northern labor offered by Eric Foner in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Jentz and Schneirov do not confine their study of the rise of class consciousness in Chicago to the working class. Their narrative follows Chicago’s burgeoning capitalists down a parallel track. Local events like the Great Fire of 1871 and a second major fire in 1874 combined with the 1873 panic to raise the specter of severe social disorder on the scale of the Paris Commune. Fear drove business competitors together to form the Citizens Association, which attempted to use the organs of municipal power to protect property and coerce the working class into order. Nonetheless, it is clear that the authors’ real interest is with the story of working-class politics. Their study does not detail the regional and national social, financial, or organizational networks that undergirded the rise of industry in Chicago. That subject remains largely unexplored for nineteenth-century Chicago. Jentz and Schneirov have...

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Volatile Alliances: Middle-Class Reformers and Working-Class Activists in Nineteenth-Century Boston Brian Greenberg (bio) David A. Zonderman. Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2011. xii + 312 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $28.95. In November 1865, the ardent abolitionist and acclaimed orator Wendell Phillips told a group of Boston workers meeting in Faneuil Hall in support of the eight-hour workday that, throughout all his years of antislavery activity, he had opposed the idea that the “laborer must necessarily be owned by the capitalists or individuals.” As that struggle for the ownership of labor appeared to be ending “we fitly commence a struggle,” Phillips declared, “to define and arrange the true relations of capital and labor.”1 The demand for an eight-hour workday was a key goal of the newly invigorated labor movement after the Civil War. In Massachusetts, the eight-hour movement was chiefly identified with Ira Steward, a prominent official of the Machinists’ and Blacksmiths’ International Union. In the summer of 1869, Steward and other labor activists, along with middle-class reformers, founded Boston’s Eight Hour League. By then, Steward and Phillips were well acquainted, and, like Steward, Phillips underscored the benefits to the community if workers had greater leisure. Echoing a precept basic to Steward’s reform creed, Phillips identified eight hours as “the first measure to be urged and the first rule to be established.”2 Steward and Phillips had a public falling out in 1872. In May of that year, the Eight Hour League, under Steward’s direction, censured Phillips, charging that the patrician reformer’s expansive rhetoric and agenda were “distracting public and political attention” and, as a result, were undermining the factory operatives’ current campaign for ten-hour legislation (p. 142). Phillips, in anticipation of the league’s censure, had already persuaded the Massachusetts Labor Union to pass a resolution that appeared to deliberately snub George McNeill, Steward’s closest ally and president of the Boston Eight Hour League. Shortly after Steward and Phillips’ personal and political breakup, the vigorous coalition of worker-activists and middle-class labor reformers in Massachusetts became hopelessly fragmented, a point that David Zonderman [End Page 271] makes in Uneasy Allies: Working for Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Boston, his illuminating study of Boston’s labor reform movement from its origins in the 1830s to the dawn of the twentieth century. Uneasy Allies traces the often-tenuous cross-class alliances that Boston’s middle-class reformers forged with working-class activists during the nineteenth century. In his well-researched and highly informative study, Zonderman chronicles the activities of the numerous labor reform organizations that campaigned for better working conditions and the dignity of labor in Boston during this period. Unlike David Montgomery, who’s magisterial Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (1967) explained the underlying ideological and political meaning of labor reform, Uneasy Allies follows the tactical debates and evolving structures and strategies that dominated Boston’s labor reform movement. Zonderman’s account is one of uneven progress and internal tensions through the century’s middle decades and of decline by century’s end. Boston in the 1830s was a thriving port city of more than sixty thousand inhabitants. The broad-based labor reform coalitions that began to form in these years championed both immediate and more utopian goals. Early labor reformers agreed that securing a shorter workday was a necessary first step to achieving more extensive social change. The key questions that animated the first cross-class alliances continued to energize the cross-class labor reform movement in Boston throughout the nineteenth century: whether to focus on immediate improvements in working conditions, especially the shorter workday, or on long-term changes in the social structure; whether to function primarily as educational or as activist organizations, and, if the latter, whether to agitate for an improved workplace or to engage in electoral politics; and whether to concentrate their efforts on local, state, or regional labor reform. Boston’s first cross-class labor reform organizations emerged as alternatives to the city’s struggling trade unions and workingmen’s parties. Founded on February 16...

Reimagining Judaism

Reimagining Judaism

Forecasting the economic benefit of reducing non-operative time

To the Editor, With reference to Head et al.’s ‘‘swing room’’ model based on regional anesthesia, they showed that patients undergoing hand and wrist surgery with regional anesthesia can have a briefer non-operative time period and more cases can be scheduled within an eight-hour workday. They state: ‘‘These findings contrast with those of Dexter et al. who found that anesthesia-controlled time (or the time from surgical closure on one patient until anesthesia is ready on the following patient) for most types of surgeries would have to be decreased by more than 100% in order to be able to book one additional 30-min case each day.’’ First, in response to their statement, I defined anesthesia-controlled time as ‘‘the sum of 1) the time starting when the patient enters an OR to when positioning or skin preparation can begin plus 2) the time starting when the surgical dressing is completed to when the patient leaves the OR.’’ Head et al. misstate my definition. Second, the mean surgical time for hand cases was 40 min in Table 1 of both Head et al.’s and my articles. Also, the mean non-operative time in Table 1 of my article was 35 min, 12 min being anesthesia-controlled time. According to Table 3 in my article, the ‘‘decrease in anesthesia time needed to predictably finish earlier’’ was 110%, or 13 min. Since Table 3 of Head et al.’s article shows a 39-min reduction, my calculations also predict additional case(s) in the eight-hour period. Third, the cases studied by Head et al. were considered completed within an eight-hour period not rationally scheduled into an eight-hour period. Cases have predictive variability (e.g., a case scheduled for 45 min could take one hour). A rational manager whose goal is an eight-hour workday schedules fewer than eight hours’ worth of cases (e.g., 7.3 hr). The header in my Table 3 reads ‘‘predictably finish earlier’’, since my analysis takes this into account. Head et al.’s formula is economically irrational. The issue is simply their analysis, not their conclusions, as their approach to use anesthesia assistants to monitor patients after regional anesthesia has excellent potential to increase productivity. The benefit of their approach will simply be slightly less than they predict because of the issues of ‘‘reliably’’ scheduling another case and the likelihood that an entire room of appropriate cases can be scheduled daily.

A Proposal for a Safe Exposure Level for Diacetyl

Diacetyl is a naturally occurring compound that has been used in concentrated form as a food additive, particularly in butter flavorings. Inhalation of diacetyl and butter flavoring fumes has caused a variety of respiratory diseases in workers and consumers including bronchiolitis obliterans (BO), a relatively rare, severe, and irreversible lung disease. A safe level of exposure to diacetyl has not been established. We review the literature on diacetyl and flavoring toxicity and critique a recent proposal for an occupational exposure limit (OEL) of 0.2 ppm for diacetyl. We present unpublished data and novel analyses in support of our proposal for a safe level of exposure. Our findings indicate that a safe level of exposure exists around or below a time-weighted average of 1 ppb for an eight-hour workday. The levels of exposure we found to be unsafe include ranges that popcorn consumers may potentially be exposed to, indicating a risk of severe lung disease (including BO) for some consumers.

Energy expenditure of interruptions to sedentary behavior.

BackgroundAdvances in technology, social influences and environmental attributes have resulted in substan-tial portions of the day spent in sedentary pursuits. Sedentary behavior may be a cause of many chronic diseases including obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome. Research demonstrated that breaking up sedentary time was beneficially associated with markers of body composition, cardiovascular health and type 2 diabetes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to quantify the total energy expenditure of three different durations of physical activity within a 30-minute sedentary period and to examine the potential benefits of interrupting sedentary behavior with physical activity for weight control.MethodsParticipants completed four consecutive 30-minute bouts of sedentary behavior (reading, working on the computer, or doing other desk activities) with and without interruptions of walking at a self-selected pace. Bout one contained no walking interruptions. Bout two contained a 1-minute walking period. Bout three contained a 2-minute walking period. Bout four contained a 5-minute walking period. Body composition and resting metabolic rate were assessed.ResultTwenty males and females (18-39 years) completed this study. Results of the repeated measures analysis of variance with post-hoc testing showed that significantly more energy was expended during each 30 minute sedentary bout with a walking break than in the 30 minute sedentary bout (p < 0.05 for all comparisons). On average, participants expended an additional 3.0, 7.4, and 16.5 additional net or activity kilocalories during bouts 2, 3, and 4, respectively compared with bout 1. When extrapolated for a full eight-hour working day, this data shows that an individual would theoretically expend an additional 24, 59 or 132 kilocalories per day, if they stood up and walked at a normal, self selected pace for one, two or five minutes every hour, respectively, compared with sitting for the 8-hour period.ConclusionsThis study demonstrated that making small changes, such as taking a five minute walking break every hour could yield beneficial weight control or weight loss results. Therefore, taking breaks from sedentary time is a potential outlet to prevent obesity and the rise of obesity in developed countries.

Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union

The idea of leisure and vacations in the Soviet Union at first glance suggests a paradox. As a system based on the labor theory of value, the USSR emphasized production as the foundation of wealth, personal worth, and the path to a society of abundance for all. Work—physical or mental—was the obligation of all citizens. But work took its toll on the human organism, and along with creating the necessary incentives and conditions for productive labor a socialist system would also include reproductive rest as an integral element of its economy. The eight-hour work day, a weekly day off from work, and an annual vacation constituted the triad of restorative and healthful rest opportunities in the emerging Soviet system of the 1920s and 1930s.

Shiny Science: A New Substitute for Hexavalent Chromium

Although perhaps more familiar to those of us of a certain age who remember when all cars had sparkling mirror-finish bumpers, chromium still plays a big part in industry. Chromium is valued for its brightness, durability, resistance to corrosion, and hardness. It is used as a pigment in paint, inks, and plastics, as an anticorrosion agent in protective coatings, and in chrome plating on such things as aircraft engine components, tool and die parts, railroad wheel bearings, and, of course, the “brightwork” that trims motorcycles, cars, and trucks. As more and more scientific studies have revealed, however, chromium also has a darker side. The chromium used in the plating industry is primarily hexavalent chromium, which is a very different animal from the trivalent form required by the human body. Hexavalent chromium is a potent human carcinogen, and can also cause dermal irritation and kidney and liver damage. Now, in an effort to find safer alternatives, researchers are looking at tailored nanostructures that offer the appearance and durability of hexavalent chromium without the hazards.

Cumulative Effects of Load Frequency and Velocity on the Lumbar Spine Response during a Repetitive Lifting Task

Work—related low back disorders arise from a complex interaction of events. One aspect of interest is cyclic or repetitive tasks, which are performed on a daily basis in a variety of situations, and often for extended periods of time. The specific questions to be addressed in this study are the effects of the load frequency and time-dependent material properties on the lumbar spine component behavior. The newly developed and validated, subject specific, finite element model of lumbar spine is used in conjunction with kinematic data imported from human subjects experimental testing of repetitive sagittally-symmetric lifting and lowering tasks. Creep and energy dissipation in the lumbar spine components are used to quantify the effect of lifting frequency and velocity on the potential for injury over an eight-hour workday.

Decibel Hell: The Effects of Living in a Noisy World

It’s not difficult for a person to encounter sound at levels that can cause adverse health effects. During a single day, people living in a typical urban environment can experience a wide range of sounds in many locations, including shopping malls, schools, the workplace, recreational centers, and the home. Even once-quiet locales have become polluted with noise. In fact, it’s difficult today to escape sound completely. In its 1999 Guidelines for Community Noise, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared, “Worldwide, noise-induced hearing impairment is the most prevalent irreversible occupational hazard, and it is estimated that 120 million people worldwide have disabling hearing difficulties.” Growing evidence also points to many other health effects of too much volume. The growing noise pollution problem has many different causes. Booming population growth and the loss of rural land to urban sprawl both play a role. Other causes include the lack of adequate anti-noise regulations in many parts of the world; the electronic nature of our age, which encourages many noisy gadgets; the rising number of vehicles on the roads; and busier airports. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long identified transportation—passenger vehicles, trains, buses, motorcycles, medium and heavy trucks, and aircraft—as one of the most pervasive outdoor noise sources, estimating in its 1981 Noise Effects Handbook that more than 100 million people in the United States are exposed to noise sources from traffic near their homes. Some experts define noise simply as “unwanted sound,” but what can be unwanted for one person can be pleasant or even essential sound to to another—consider boom boxes, car stereos, drag races, and lawn mowers in this context. Sound intensity is measured in decibels (dB); the unit A-weighted dB (dBA) is used to indicate how humans hear a given sound. Zero dBA is considered the point at which a person begins to hear sound. A soft whisper at 3 feet equals 30 dBA, a busy freeway at 50 feet is around 80 dBA, and a chain saw can reach 110 dBA or more at operating distance. Brief exposure to sound levels exceeding 120 dBA without hearing protection may even cause physical pain. Mark Stephenson, a Cincinnati, Ohio–based senior research audiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), says his agency’s definition of hazardous noise is sound that exceeds the time-weighted average of 85 dBA, meaning the average noise exposure measured over a typical eight-hour work day. Other measures and definitions are used for other purposes. For example, “sound exposure level” accounts for variations in sound from moment to moment, while “equivalent sound level” determines the value of a steady sound with the same dBA sound energy as that contained in a time-varying sound.

Peasant Identity, Worker Identity: Multiple Modes of Rural Consciousness in Highland Ecuador.

On December 30, 1930, agricultural workers on the Pesillo hacienda in the canton of Cayambe, in the northern Ecuador highlands, rose up in protest against abuses they faced at the hands of their bosses. Local governmental officials reported that no one was working as the strike spread across the hacienda and threatened to engulf neighboring properties. Pesillo's newly formed peasant union El Inca, as well as Tierra Libre from the neighboring Moyurco hacienda, presented a list of 17 demands which focused almost exclusively on issues of working conditions, indebtedness, and salaries. They demanded that the patrones (bosses) fire mayordomos (overseers) who mistreated workers, raise their daily salary to forty centavos, recognize an eight-hour work day, pay women for their labor, and establish a school for their children.

Controversy and Conflict in the Henry Street Settlement Music School, 1927-1935

Controversy and Conflict in the Henry Street Settlement Music School, 1927–1935 Shannon L. Green (bio) In 1971 Helen Hall (1892-1982), the president of the National Federation of Settlements, published Unfinished Business in Neighborhood and Nation, memoirs of her tenure as Henry Street Settlement's second di-rector.1 The book relates many of the activities that took place at the settlement house, including those of its music school. Hall also describes with fondness many of Henry Street's staff members, including Grace Spofford, the second director of the settlement's music school. Curiously, Hall's book fails to make any mention of Hedi Katz, the music school's founder and first director, even though their terms at Henry Street overlapped by at least six months and Katz had led the school for its first eight years. Katz's peculiar absence is symptomatic of divisive opinions regarding the purpose of musical training within the social settlements during the years of the Great Depression. Beginning in the late 1880s and continuing well into the first half of the twentieth century, middle-class Progressivists founded settlement houses to alleviate the difficult living and working conditions of tenement neighborhoods.2 As urban community centers, social settlement houses in the large industrial cities of the United States were emblematic of the Progressive era in which they originated; many settlements, especially Hull-House in Chicago, were centers of the era's reform activities. Settlement leaders [End Page 73] were essential in the passage and implementation of laws involving child labor, the eight-hour workday, and improved safety in factories.3 Settlement workers, many of whom were "residents" living within the settlement houses, were for the most part middle-class white Protestant men and women. Many subscribed to Progressive philosophy, devoting their professional and personal lives to helping those deemed less fortunate in immediate and concrete ways. They brought educational opportunities to the tenements, offering an affordable means for the inhabitants to better their circumstances. In addition, settlements offered arts programs such as private music lessons, participation in choirs and other ensembles, and regular low-cost concerts to help tenement workers forget, if only temporarily, their deplorable living and working situations. After many years of offering various musical activities to the surrounding neighborhood, the directors at Henry Street Settlement, located on Henry Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan Island in New York City, organized a formal music school in 1928.4 The school quickly gained the committed support of such renowned musicians as Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Jascha Heifetz, all of whom were members of the school's advisory committee. The school also received aid from members of well-known business families such as the Marshall Field family. Director Lillian Wald chose Hedi Katz as the first director of the music school. A European-born violinist with impressive credentials, Katz had studied at the Royal Academy in Vienna and had been a pupil of Arnold Rosee, Emile Sauret, and Carl Flesch. For four years she served as a first violinist in the symphony orchestra in The Hague, Holland.5 Wald first made Katz's acquaintance, shortly after immigrating to the United States, through a mutual friend who had asked Wald to assist Katz with an "unfortunate" financial situation.6 Before making her final decision regarding who would lead the music school, Wald contacted Katz and asked her to write a plan for the school. Wald then asked three friends and experts to review Katz's plan: Janet Schenck, director of the Neighborhood Music School (later the Manhattan School of Music) in New York and a leader of the Music Division of the National Federation of Settlements, the conductor and composer Walter Damrosch, and Melzar Chaffee, associated with the Third Street Music School Settlement.7 After receiving their full approval of Katz and her plan, Wald hired her for the position. The school's first season began in the fall of 1928. As director, Katz was paid thirty-five hundred dollars for operating the school during eight months of the school year and for any necessary summer preparations. As for other settlement music school directors, her position was considered part-time, and Katz...

EMG Changes of the ECU Muscle with Exposure to Repetitive Ulnar Deviation

Our objective was to quantify changes in muscle EMG activity due to repetitive work. Using a repeated measures design, 13 females participated in 3 conditions, each lasting two eight-hour days: a control inactive condition, and two repetitive work conditions with ulnar deviation tasks at 20 and 25 repetitions per minute. EMG of the extensor carpi ulnaris muscle (ECU) was recorded during voluntary isometric contractions (20% and 60% MVC) eight times throughout the work and control days. The amplitude of the EMG signal was lower on workdays compared to the control days. Initial median frequency of the EMG signal showed no change between the control and workdays; however, the decline of the median frequency with respect to time over the course of each isometric contraction was steeper during workdays compared to control days. These changes suggest that the muscles are in an early stage of fatigue when working for an eight-hour workday.

Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864-1897

This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike.

Labor and urban politics: class conflict and the origins of modern liberalism in Chicago, 1864-97

This finely detailed narrative is the definitive account of the rise to power of the Chicago labor movement amidst the 1877 railroad strike, the 1886 struggle over the eight-hour workday, and the 1894 Pullman strike.

Peruvian Politics and the Eight-Hour Day: Rethinking the 1919 General Strike

The general strike for the eight-hour day (13-15 January 1919), has long been considered the founding moment of Peru’s labour movement. Central to the heroic mythology of the strike is the belief that the government capitulated to the workers’ demands reluctantly, in the face of an overwhelming show of resolve and solidarity. This paper offers a major revision of that view, arguing that while the strike was a great tactical success, historians have overlooked the reasons why President Pardo chose to negotiate with workers and decree the eight-hour workday. 1) A significant and growing circle of elites had come to view the adoption of “advanced,” European social legislation as a way to “improve” Peru’s working class and foster the country’s development. They saw the eight-hour day as a reasonable demand, in keeping with precedents set in the so-called “civilized countries.” 2) Momentary political concerns played a crucial role in President Pardo’s decision, as his Partido Civil sought to counter growing working-class support for the imminent opposition candidacy of Augusto B. Leguia. 3) Most importantly, the textile factories most affected by the strike did not object to the principle of the eight-hour day. Because they paid piecework rates rather than day-wages, reducing the hours of labour did not alter their costs per unit of production. In retrospect, therefore, the eight-hour day was hardly the overwhelming victory it first appeared to be, and the workers’ misreading of what had happened led them to overestimate their strength, setting the stage for a shattering defeat later that year.

Taboo and Time-Work Experience in Madagascar

Clocks define the days and the work rhythms of most of the world's people. Debates and theories about how the time-work experience is shaped by the exigencies of capitalist development and the demands of time machines commonly focus on industrial transformation in Western Europe (Mumford 1934; Thrift 1981). Time-work experience in regional agrarian transformation remains problematic and undertheorized, perhaps because of the intimate connections between agriculture and nature, the flux of the seasons, and the time lag from planting to harvesting (Thompson 1967, 60; Mann and Dickinson 1978). Farm work is task oriented and defies measurement by a clock the way a typist's keystrokes on a computer can be counted per minute or calibrated to the passage of hours in an eight-hour workday. Time-work experience on a farm is shaped by geography, land tenure, cropping patterns, seasonal changes, and availability of labor. Labor time is calibrated in terms of preparing soil for planting and of harvest demands, which does not mean that farm work is unchanging. Green-revolution technologies and the industrialization of agriculture have changed the character of farm work throughout the world. This article examines how communal and individual time-work experience is changed by agricultural modernization. The case study is set in Madagascar, where change was begun by a large-scale irrigated rice project and the transfer of green-revolution technologies. I draw heavily on my field research on agrarian transformation in Alaotra, a region popularly known as Madagascar's granary (Jarosz,1990). The purpose of this text is to demonstrate how adherence to ancient taboos about work rhythms has constrained change in time-work experience wrought by the transfer of green revolution technology. This adherence to custom is one local-level response to the governmental intervention in land tenure and cropping practices that threatened regional agricultural diversity and assumed unproblematic access to both men's and women's labor time. TIME-WORK EXPERIENCE IN AGRICULTURE The myths and rituals that surround planting and harvest times attest to the coevolution of cultivation with science, culture, and human life itself. In Madagascar, for example, geese are sacrificed to the ancestors at the beginning of the planting season. Their heads are impaled on sharpened sticks near sacred rocks or trees that possess enormous symbolic significance. These natural and sacred objects are linkages to the past and to ancestors. Annual planting rituals take place in sacred groves delimited by ancestral tradition. The community prays for rain and an abundant harvest and marks the commencement of another task-based cycle of farm work in which the length and intensity of work increase at planting and harvest times. Each farmer cultivates an array of fields and crops. This diversity is sought as one way to hedge against the risks of farming and also to assure a steady supply of cash and food crops for market and family. A family may own irrigated and swamp-rice fields and cultivate rain-fed fields of rice, carrots, corn, beans, and manioc. Cycles of planting, weeding, and harvesting associated with different crops may lead to insufficient laborers and the need to hire seasonal workers. Farm work is traditionally performed by members of the immediate family or by work groups and is the source of much social life, singing, and communal cohesion. Tasks are performed according to the demands of the agricultural season, and they blur the boundaries between work and play and are defined in terms of existence and consciousness (Feeley-Harnik 1991). The concepts of rationality and efficiency in agricultural production are derived from the organization and ideology of Western industrial technology and are part of the legacy of the industrial revolution. Increased yields that minimize risk and labor time are important criteria in modern agriculture. …

White-Collar Lima, 1910–1929: Commercial Employees and the Rise of the Peruvian Middle Class

T 1HE year 1919 saw increasing social unrest throughout much of the world, and Peru was no exception. A general strike in January led President Jose Pardo to decree the eight-hour workday, and demonstrations for lower food prices ignited a wave of looting and mob violence in May.1 Politics was equally unstable: on July 4, President-elect Augusto B. Leguia carried out a coup rather than wait for Congress to confirm his victory. Amid the agitation, few paid attention to a strike called one Saturday morning in late September. Led by clerks in the import-export firms, banks, and retail stores of Lima and Callao, the action was nonviolent, orderly, even polite. No mounted police were called in; in fact, the National Assembly voted to support the strikers' demands. The pickets, numbering about 1,500, went home as soon as business leaders agreed to arbitration.2

Physiological Capacities of Individuals with Cerebral Palsy

The physical work capacity (PWC) and the physiological response to stimulated tasks of nine ambulatory individuals with cerebral palsy (CP) were studied. Energy demand for each work task was determined by percentage of PWC (%PWC). Results demonstrated significant differences in energy demand attributed to frequency and mode of lift regardless of gender. No significant difference for energy demand, however, was seen for load lifted. The %PWC for several tasks was near or above the accepted limit for an eight-hour workday, suggesting that the subjects were performing close to their physical limits or higher and would possibly experience fatigue before the eight-hour workday ended. The results also indicated that the PWC of subjects in this study was inferior to that of their nondisabled peers.