{"id":46584,"date":"2013-06-30T08:30:37","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T07:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/back-to-the-future-workers-fight-for-better-pay-and-shorter-hours\/46584\/"},"modified":"2013-06-30T08:30:37","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T07:30:37","slug":"back-to-the-future-workers-fight-for-better-pay-and-shorter-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/back-to-the-future-workers-fight-for-better-pay-and-shorter-hours\/","title":{"rendered":"Back To the Future: Workers Fight For Better Pay AND Shorter hours"},"content":{"rendered":"

July 1, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
\n<\/em> \u00a0| <\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Like this article?<\/p>\n

Join our email list:<\/p>\n

Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.<\/h3>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

This essay was originally published <\/a>in Issue 10 of Jacobin. <\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cA hundred years ago [Benjamin] Franklin said that six hours a day was enough for anyone to work and if he was right then, two hours a day ought to be enough now.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lucy Parsons spoke those words in 1886, shortly before the execution of her husband, Albert. The two had been leaders in the eight-hour-day movement in Chicago, which culminated in a general strike, a rally, and the throwing of a bomb into the crowd in Haymarket Square. Albert Parsons, along with three other \u201canarchists,\u201d was hanged for the crime, though he\u2019d already left the rally by the time the bomb was thrown. Lucy kept up the fight for the rest of her life, working with anarchists, socialists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist Party for the cause. <\/p>\n

Women like Lucy Parsons were at the heart of the struggle for the shorter work week, an integral part of the labor movement until the end of the Depression, which saw the forty-hour week enshrined in law after the defeat of Hugo Black\u2019s thirty-hour-week bill. As Kathi Weeks writes in \u201c\u2018Hours for What We Will\u2019: Work, Family and the Movement for Shorter Hours\u201d in Feminist Studies 35<\/em>, after World War ii, the demand for shorter hours was increasingly associated with women workers, and was mostly sidelined as the forty-hour week became an institution. <\/p>\n

\u201cNot only wages \u2013 I am thinking here of the \u2018female wage\u2019 and the \u2018family wage\u2019 \u2013 but hours, too, were constructed historically with reference to the family,\u201d Weeks notes. The eight-hour day and five-day week presumed that the worker was a man supported by a woman in the home, and it shaped expectations that his work was important and should be decently paid, while women\u2019s work was not really work at all (even though, as Weeks notes, the gender division of labor was supported by some paid domestic work, done largely by women of color). The postwar labor movement focused on overtime pay and wages, leaving the women\u2019s issue of shorter hours mostly forgotten. <\/p>\n

But the power of the eight-hour-day movement was that it didn\u2019t require the worker to love her job, to identify with it for life, and to take pride in it in order to organize for better conditions. The industrial union movement rose up to organize those left out of the craft unions, the so-called \u201cunskilled\u201d workers who recognized that they were not defined by their work and that they wanted to be liberated from it as much as possible. That, in their minds, was what made them worthy of respect, not their skill level or some intrinsic identity. <\/p>\n

The fight for shorter hours unified workers across gender and race, class and nationality, skill and ability. It did not require the valorization of \u201cman\u2019s work\u201d or the idealization of women\u2019s natural goodness. <\/p>\n

It is a curious fact that in today\u2019s climate of increased work for less pay, some of the highest-profile strikes of the last year have called for more<\/em> hours. As labor and its supporters cheered the strikers at Walmart and at New York\u2019s fast-food restaurants, it was taken for granted that these part-time workers (some two-thirds of them women) should be calling for more work. <\/p>\n

Part-time work and flexible time have been touted as solutions to the problem of \u201cwork-family balance,\u201d which is somehow only ever considered to be a woman\u2019s problem. In the postwar era, as Erin Hatton writes in The Temp Economy<\/em>, temp agencies pushed part-time temp work as a great, flexible option for women who wanted to earn a little extra \u201cpin money.\u201d The temp agencies\u2019 low pay was acceptable because the workers were presumed to be married, not \u201creal workers\u201d who needed a family-supporting wage. Hatton notes that by the 1980s, temp agencies were spreading their model of work, with its low wages and part-time schedules \u2013 formerly associated with women \u2013 into the rest of the economy, contributing to what Leah Vosko calls a \u201cfeminization\u201d of work in the entire economy. <\/p>\n

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

July 1, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. This essay was originally published in Issue 10 of Jacobin. \u201cA hundred years ago [Benjamin] Franklin said that six hours a day was enough for anyone to work and if he was right then, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-46584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}