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To overcome this difficulty, an amendment to the State constitution was passed in 1902 by a large majority, but the legislature, after having thus received a direct command to establish the eight-hour law, adjourned without taking action.
An order by the Soviet of Petrograd workmen in November, 1905, decreeing the eight-hour day in all factories sufficed to make the capitalists forego their historical role of champions of popular liberty against autocracy. If the bourgeoisie itself will not fight for a democracy, reasoned the revolutionary socialists, why have such a democracy at all?
Like the Socialists, they welcome the "State Socialist" labor program, government insurance for workingmen against old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment, a legal eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, industrial education, the prohibition of child labor, etc.
The year 1867 was the banner year for such State legislation. Eight-hour laws were passed in Illinois, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Missouri, and New York. California passed such a law in 1868. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Maryland, and Minnesota bills were introduced but were defeated. Two common features characterized these laws, whether enacted or merely proposed to the legislatures.
The four brotherhoods made a joint demand for an eight-hour day early in 1916. The railway officials claimed that the demand for the reduction of the work-day from ten to eight hours with ten hours' pay and a time and a half rate for overtime was not made in good faith.
The platform was purely legislative and demanded legal incorporation for trade unions, compulsory education for children, the prohibition of child labor under fourteen, uniform apprentice laws, the enforcement of the national eight-hour law, prison labor reform, abolition of the "truck" and "order" system, mechanics' lien, abolition of conspiracy laws as applied to labor organizations, a national bureau of labor statistics, a protective tariff for American labor, an anti-contract immigrant law, and recommended "all trade and labor organizations to secure proper representation in all law-making bodies by means of the ballot, and to use all honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished."
Land reform, taxation reform, the eight-hour day, are being carried out, however. But when it comes to such matters as an extended suffrage, the capitalists will balk.
In 1894 a bill for a compulsory eight-hour day for miners was introduced, but was withdrawn before being submitted to a vote. In 1899 a bill was passed requiring the provision of a sufficient number of seats for all female assistants in retail stores.
The demands were one day's rest in seven, an eight-hour day shift and a seven-hour night shift, and a general increase of 15 percent in wages. The public and a large portion of the press gave their sympathy to the strikers, not so much on account of the oppressed condition of the telegraphers as of the general hatred that prevailed against Jay Gould, who then controlled the Western Union Company.
The news of two important events in the labor world of America reached the anarchists of the Jura and filled them, Guillaume says, "with a lively emotion." In June, 1877, Kropotkin called attention to the act of the Supreme Court of the United States in declaring unconstitutional the eight-hour law on Government work.
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