United States or Tokelau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In 1892 a new general eight-hour law was passed, which provided that eight-hours should be the length of the working day on all public works of the United States, whether directed by the government or under contract or sub-contract. Within the next few years interpretations rendered by attorney generals of the United States practically rendered the law useless.
A fair office day's work may begin at eight and end at six, or, if the mail comes in, at midnight. There is no overtime or eight-hours' baby-talk in tea. Yonder are the ships; here is the stuff, and behind all is the American market. The rest is your own affair. The narrow streets are blocked with the wains bringing down, in boxes of every shape and size, the up-country rough leaf.
In the sixties we saw the national trade unions join with other local and miscellaneous labor organizations in the National Labor Union upon a political platform of eight-hours and greenbackism. In 1873 the same national unions asserted their rejection of "panaceas" and politics by attempting to create in the National Labor Congress a federation of trades of a strictly economic character.
The free wage-worker of the modern world, on the contrary, is always condemned to labor inhuman both in its duration and its character, and this is the justification of that demand for an Eight-Hours day which can already count more than one victory and which is destined to a sure triumph.
The entire party seemed to have separated at Basle, and, in that eight-hours' start they had of him, to have disappeared to the four cardinal points. He had lingered a few days in London to transact some business; he would linger a few days longer in New York before returning to San Francisco.
"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you get a considerable vote," he resumed, after a pause; "it's like women's suffrage. People will go on voting for this kind of thing, till there seems a chance of getting it. Then!" "Ah, well!" said Wharton, easily, "I see we shan't get you." "I! vote for an eight-hours day, by local and trade option!
I wouldn't mind being there again, with the Variety Theatre to follow. Would you, Clifford? 'Well, I don't know, says the other swell. 'I find this amazing good fun for a bit. I never was in such grand condition since I left Oxford. This eight-hours' shift business is just the right thing for training. I feel fit to go for a man's life.
The adoption in all industrial countries of the 'English week', with its half-holiday so much coveted by the continental worker the establishment of a uniform working day the gradual introduction of the eight-hours shift into such 'continuous industries' as steel-smelting and glass-blowing an international agreement to eliminate the use of lead from many branches of the pottery industry and to limit and safeguard its use in all others, these were only some among the questions which study and investigation and discussion had brought to a stage at which the Association could look upon them as fit matter for potential international conventions in August 1914.
Rousseau's Héloïse and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield were quite a generation before the Revolution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly begun. The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each other's eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills and Land Nationalisation.
The native workers, who were in the minority, kept to themselves as though they felt an inward contempt for those fellows who had travelled so far to fish in the troubled waters of their distress. They were working three shifts, each of eight hours' duration. "Oho!" thought Pelle, "why, this, good God, is the eight-hours' day! This is surely the State of the future!"
Word Of The Day