Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Eight-hour theory in the american federation of labor / Henry Raymond Mussey

Collection:: Economics Books

232 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK the hopeless task of organizing American industrial labor in the last quarter of the nineteenth century could scarcely have been successfully accomplished by any man who did not vastly over- emphasize the importance and effectiveness of organization. If that faith did not enable Mr. Gompers to cut his way through the masses of legal red tape wound round labor organizations during the present century, it did at least enable him during the preceding years to weld the American labor movement together into a powerful working body. In that task of organization the eight-hour issue was a tool of great value,—to no small extent, it is submitted, because its underlying theory made it an effective gospel under the circum- stances then existing. That theory came down from the eight- hour advocates of the years 1865-72. Mr. Gompers once put the whole thing thus: ‘‘In the language of that foremost of eco- nomic and social thinkers, Ira Steward, ‘The way out of the wage system is through higher wages, resultant only from shorter hours.” ’’* The reader should note well the little word only, for it represented Steward’s actual thought, and it represented the dominant wage theory of the American Federation during its first ten proselyting years. In his autobiography Mr. Gompers testi- fied to his debt to Ira Steward, George E. McNeill and George Gunton, as leaders of the earlier movement.” They furnished the idea, and Mr. Gompers hammered out the organization to make the idea effective. Let us look first at the idea as enunciated by Steward. In his pamphlet on ‘‘The Eight-Hour Movement. A Reduction of Hours is an Increase of Wages,’’ published by the Boston Labor Reform Association in 1865, he states his ultimate aim thus: ‘The simple increase of wages is the first step on that long road which ends at last in a more equable distribution of the fruits of toil. For Wages will continue to increase until the Capitalist and Laborer are one. But we must confine ourselves first to the simple fact that a reduction of Hours is an increase of Wages.’ This last revolutionary proposition, which became the corner- stone of American Federation thinking, he proceeded to demon- strate in the following series of propositions : 1 Proceedings of the A. F. of L., 1890, p. 13. > Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor, Vol. I, pp, 59, 209, 290. * Steward. Ira. The Eight-Hour Movement, p. 6.

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