230 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK
It is not the purpose of this paper to trace the external progress
of the eight-hour movement. Disregarding the rhetorical exag-
erations of a public address such as that just quoted, it is
sufficient to observe that there was an interesting agitation during
the sixties and the early seventies, which provided nearly all the
ideas of the later movement. A long interval of quiescence fol-
lowed the panic of 1873. In the middle eighties the unions again
took up the question, making an unsuccessful attempt to intro-
duce the eight-hour day in 1886. A period of vigorous agitation
followed, culminating in the successful effort of the carpenters
in 1890. The miners, who were chosen by the Federation as the
next trade to lead the fight, failed at the last moment, to the dis-
couragement of the other unions. Then came the great Home-
stead and Coeur d’Alene strikes of 1892, and attention was
liverted to other issues, the eight-hour question losing its primacy.
In the course of years, however, progress was made, and in 1907
President Gompers reported more than two dozen crafts work-
ing only eight hours, most of them in the building and printing
trades and the mines. The International Typographical Union
had just expended four million dollars in establishing the eight-
hour day.’ It remained for the events of the war to complete
the process just sketched, and to usher in the present era, in
which eight hours may be regarded as the normal workday of
organized labor.
It is the ideas underlying the movement, especially in its earlier
period down to 1892, with which we are concerned. Why did the
men who were to unify the American labor movement take up
first the question of hours, and for ten years make the shorter
workday the central demand in their positive platform? The
opinion may be hazarded that it is because the theory of the
eicht-hour day happened to fit particularly well the practical
needs of their situation, and was therefore a tool well-nigh indis-
pensable to them in their hard task of organization. The matter
is not without interest for the student of economic theory, and
particularly of the productivity theory of wages, inseparably
connected with the name of Professor Clark.
For more than forty years, from the establishment of the
Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1881 down
L Proceedings, 1907, p. 32.
2 Ibid., p. 33.