Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology by Lizzie O'Shea

Author:Lizzie O'Shea
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2019-05-13T23:00:00+00:00

8

Automation Can Mean Less

Work and More Living

Downing Tools so We Can

Build Robots to Eat the Rich

In the foundations of the old law quadrangle at the University of Melbourne there is a plaque. The quad was built in 1854, and the plaque was placed two years later. It commemorates the historic strike by stonemasons on-site. They had downed tools and marched to Parliament, protesting their recalcitrant contractor who was not respecting the length of the workday that had been negotiated. After an inquiry, the government officially sanctioned their demand for an eight-hour day, paving the way for the system to spread to other industries.

The plaque is inconspicuous, and the demand hardly seems radical by today’s standards, but it was the first institutional recognition of a movement that challenged the power of capital all over the world—the movement that brought us the weekend and the eight-hour work day. “[This event] was one of the earliest to establish an officially sanctioned standard at leading sites for a whole industry across a specific region,” writes historian Peter Love. “All the main participants fully understood the significance of what had happened and marked the occasion with a celebratory dinner.” That dinner marked the beginning of the tradition of working-class celebrations to commemorate the eight-hour day—which would eventually come to be known as May Day.

The downing of tools in the Antipodes was vitally connected to a large transverse movement around the globe for shorter working hours. It started as a campaign to reduce the working hours of children in England. The Cotton Mills Act passed in 1819 prohibited children under the age of nine from working in cotton mills and limited the work of people under sixteen to twelve hours a day. From here, the campaign for shorter hours for all workers gained traction globally: in 1835, there was a general strike in Philadelphia that won the ten-hour day. A little over a decade later in England, the Factories Act of 1847 mandated a ten-hour day for women and children. Following in the footsteps of the workers of Melbourne in 1854, the campaign for an eight-hour day increased in popularity, with May Day marking an annual international call for the legal protection of the eight-hour day from as early as 1871.

The eight-hour-day movement became popular with workers all around the globe. It was one of the most successful progressive social movements in history. It was internationalist in spirit, attracting support from millions across several continents, and the demand was ultimately enshrined in law in multiple countries. This represents a monumental achievement by almost any standards.

In many ways, the workers who fought for limits to the length of the working day were grappling with problems similar to those that confront society today. Nineteenth-century industrialization transformed the workday in a rapid and unprecedented manner. From a routine of labor that was built around natural limitations, such as seasons, weather and daylight, the industrial revolution brought forth the hellish possibility of ceaseless production. Industrial machinery could run continuously, meaning that the limits of the workday were defined by the physical capacity of human bodies.

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