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Sean Scalmer, "A Fair Day's Work: The Quest to Win Back Time" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
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Sean
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hannah
Thanks so much for coming and talking to me about your book, which you can see I have just here today. Sean, before we get started, I want to acknowledge country as we want to do in Australia. So I am on Dharuga and Gundagara land in the Blue Mountains. How about you?
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Sean
Yeah, I also want to acknowledge that I'm zooming in for this discussion from the lands of Wundjeri, Woiwurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Indeed.
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Hannah
So tell us a little bit about the book and how you came to write it.
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Sean
Yeah, well, so the book's called A Fair Day's Work. The subtitle is the Quest to Win Back Time. So I think the subtitle captures what the book explores, which is the efforts, collective efforts of workers to win a space away from work. It explores why they did it, how they did it, and the consequences for them and for broader Australian society. So why I wrote it, I guess two impulses. One is recovery. So it's very well known by people who aren't expert in Australian labor history that Australia was a pioneer of the Eight Hours Movement. And some workers, in fact, it's probably exaggerated in public memory, but some workers were able to win an eight hour day from 1856. And so I was conscious of that, but also conscious that that topic hadn't been researched very much. And the story of how it went from 1856 and those victories, how they were then extended across the workforce and over time and how hours were reduced after those victories in the 19th century. That problem, historical problem, interested me and I wanted to recover how that happened and why that happened. The other impulse, I suppose was alarm that, you know, I'm middle 50s, so I've lived through an experience in the labor market of just Notwithstanding the history of the Eight Hours Movement in Australia, employees generally working much Longer hours, you know, I observed my parents, so my father as a truck driver was working, you know, around 40 hours a week when I was younger, as full time permanent employee. By the time he retired, he was working casually and working 60 hours a week. My mum was working full time as a secretary, but juggling that with the care for her mother. And so my sense of just a transformation of Australian society in a bad way and trying to understand not just the victories but the losses and the tensions and how they might be addressed through greater historical knowledge, that that was really what lay behind it.
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Hannah
Yeah, yeah. So what was distinctive about Australia's approach to the eight hour day?
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Sean
Well, in some ways I'd sort of say it wasn't distinctive in, in lots of ways the, the, the campaign for an eight hour day, you know, was widely shared across labor movements around the world, so I'd want to underline that commonality. But Australia was unusual, as I mentioned, in that we were a path breaker. So there were, there are still disputes about where the eight hour day was first won, but Australian workers, particularly in Melbourne, were right at the forefront internationally of winning an eight hour day that was still six days a week from the middle 1850s. And that victory, as it was generalised, which was a slow, complicated process, that meant that workers in Australia did work less than most other places earlier on. And that also, I think, affected the character and rhythms of Australian social history, Australian self understanding. It gave birth to the first kind of civic ritual, probably in settler colonial Australian society, which was the eight hour day festival and marches around it. So that was distinctive. And then I suppose again, in a negative sense, what's distinctive is that we've, throughout, from the, from the middle of the 19th century until the 1980s, Australia remained right on the cutting edge of reducing working hours. And since that time we've fallen to the middle and then towards the back of the pack, you know, recent study of the OECD of the work life balance places Australia, I think, eighth last out of OECD countries. So that's distinctive in a way that perhaps Australians, I think, shouldn't be very proud of.
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Hannah
Indeed, indeed. So tell me a little bit about that festival. What were they doing and why was it important to them?
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Sean
Yeah. So the festival grows out of the struggle to win an eight hour day. So as I said in Melbourne in 1856, stonemasons famously walk off the job on the 21st of April and march through different work sites across the city and converge on Parliament House, which is then being built. And they're Fighting to make the eight hour day general across all work sites in the capital of Melbourne.
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Hannah
So it is not just in their occupation, it's across other occupations, across other
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Sean
occupations in the building industry. And so it's one partly through that mobilization on the 21st of April, and it's decided to have a celebration of that victory two weeks later. And workers walk off the job for the whole day and parade through the city streets and then have a celebration, a festival with dinners and speeches and music. And then that becomes the template for. On the first anniversary of the 21st of April, the next year, they decide to do that again. And it becomes not just a celebration of the victory, but actually a means of mobilization and encouragement, because you can only march on this eight hour day once your union has won the eight hour day. And so that becomes a kind of form of public advertising for all of these different workers watching on, and they begin to be incited to form their own unions, to be able to win the erdaywide day and to be able to participate in this march. And then it becomes very visible across the second half of the 19th century as more and more workers win this and as that becomes also an expression of working class collective power, of the claiming of the city as their space and trying to remake the world in ways that, that better suit their interests.
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Hannah
So do you think that this was on purpose deliberately trying to build solidarity, using this or that this was a happy accident of the celebration?
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Sean
It's hard to reconstruct, but I would say that like a lot of things, it's partly improvised and then more conscious. So I think the celebration itself was, it seems from the historical evidence that survives mostly simply a celebration. But then it was very, very clear very early on that this had an impact on the community as well as a sense of pride for the workers who'd won it. And so the efforts of an organization to create rules, to advertise, to expand the nature of the eight hour day become very evident from very early on. And you, yeah, I should underline that as a sense of the festival. I mean, it involved, at its height, workers who'd won the eight hour day, not just parading through the streets, but demonstrating their skills. So you had, you know, the bakers actually baking bread as they marched along, and the, you know, coal miners picking at coal and the tinsmiths making suits of armor and all these kinds of things. So that's one side, but then the other side of it expands into a massive sporting competition, because that's one of the things that Workers are using their free time on is to pursue sporting activities. And so the foot races and the cycling races and so on all become very important parts of the program.
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Hannah
That's so cool. That gets to something else I wanted to ask you about. It seems like I was so fascinated reading the book about the growth of the ways that they had to negotiate a bunch of ideas in order to do that. So kind of, what's the nature of time? What's the nature of leisure? So can you talk a little bit about the sorts of ideas that they were developing? And was this special in Australia too, I guess, because it strikes me as very. Perhaps they hadn't had to think through what's the nature of leisure before. Who owns time and things?
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Sean
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, that was one thing that I really found fascinating in the research for the book and that I really enjoyed recovering and sharing was the fact
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Hannah
that
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Sean
the quest to win back time wasn't just we didn't want to work less. It was based on these very sophisticated ideas about what time was and about what fairness was that developed and shifted over time. And so across the book, I sort of track three different ways of conceptualizing fairness around time. And the first of those that was really important in the 8 hours movement was really a notion of time and human rights and the humanity of the worker. And it was just basically to say, well, when we working very long hours, we are unable to fully express our humanity. And they talked about what it was to be fully human and got a depth and said, well, to be human is to have the experience of autonomy, to be able to make choices about what we want to do. To be human is to have a capacity to learn. And remembering that these people had not an opportunity for very long formal education. So the only way they were going to learn is to be able to combine it with work. To be human is to be able to participate in self government and to try and shape the polity in the world around you. And we're social animals. So to be human is to have time for your family and for your friends. And they said in all these ways, to be fully human requires time. And when we're working 60 hours a week or more, we don't have time. So you are denying us our full scope to be human. And I think that's enormously important. I mean, I still find it a really moving and powerful set of arguments. And I think it really explains what, why this movement galvanised Australian society so powerfully. Because it wasn't Just saying we want to work less, it was saying we want these human rights. And then, you know, there were other arguments that developed over time that the second one that becomes more important from the late 19th century and remains, I think important for much of the 20th century is an argument about productivity and machinery. And it's basically to say as the second industrial revolution, revolution changed the way work happened. And as machines were used more and more that had consequences for the experience of work. It meant that workers had much less autonomy, it meant that they couldn't control the pace of work. It often made old skills redundant, it led to new experiences of monotony at work, and it put people out of work. At the same time, it led to much greater profits. So there was an argument that was shared, put by workers, but then actually shared by many social reformers, which was to say that if this machinery is labor saving, as that's how it was described, well, then actually labor needs to get some benefit out of it and that that benefit should be shared in the form of less time at work. And that becomes really important to the move from a 48 hour week to a 44 hour week, to a 40 hour week and to a 38. Fundamentally, most of the argument was about this question about technological change and about a social bargain and social fairness around it. And then the third argument I explore, which again I enjoyed recovering, which was just how right from the start, the notion of the three eights of eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest, you know, is, is built upon a social blindness because it's saying once you've finished your eight hours of work, you can either suspend it in recreational rest. And then women were very outspoken from the very time of the mobilization in the 1850s, saying, well, hang on, actually there's all this work that happens at home, caring work that's absolutely essential to, to out to our society. And, and that needs to be considered in a full sense of what would be a fair day's work. And that's an argument that was put persistently from the 19th century, but only began to be, I think, heard more fully when women were able to create their own institutions that had enough weight to push this. And the labor movement, the formal labor movement and unions began to listen more really only from the 1970s. But as I closed the book by suggesting that that really important aspect of fairness still hasn't fully been recognized.
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Hannah
Yeah, yeah, I want to come back to that because I think that that's a really powerful political statement that you make towards the end of the book. But I guess there's some other ideas that I wondered if you wanted to articulate a little bit what sort of leisure was. Okay, so were there particular types of things that you were supposed to do in your time off and is, you know, did that become work as well?
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Sean
Yeah, well, so that's, that's right. That's a very interesting question. Because of course elites, as this movement is mobilizing, one of the ways they're mobilizing against it is saying, they're saying, well you can't really trust workers to have time away from work because they're going to be down the pub the whole time and they're going to be gambling and you know, they're not going to use their leisure in an appropriate way. And so partly to combat that, but I think also because there was a genuine commitment to self education as a huge part of the mobilisation of the labor movement in the 19th century. Workers put a big emphasis upon the fact that they are going to use their time in a respectable way, in a self improving way. And it's really notable how for example the stonemasons who are right at the forefront of this campaign, you know, they have their own library, union library, which to be an office holder, to be elected to be one of the librarian posts is a very prestigious thing. They post books to different work sites. I mean if you think about one of the first things that the labor movement does in this period of winning 8 hours victories is they create these trades and labour councils first in Melbourne and then in the other major centers. Well, they're places which are set aside saying now we've won the eight hour day. We want a space to assemble a place for political, political self organization but also for education. So I mean they're called, the original ones are called trades hall and Literary institute and they have libraries, coffee rooms. And you know, the trades hall in Victoria, which you know is still a very important center is you know, was a place where workers art classes and so on. You know, some of the really important painters in the 19th century in Australia first learnt some of their art at the trades hall. So yeah, there was, it was connected to this notion of self education being important to working class culture that was important as to workers themselves as an opportunity but was also a kind of definitely a way of signaling to broader society that you know, we are respectable, we can be trusted.
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Hannah
Do you think that this. Because I guess Victoria has a really important place in the history of Australian democracy altogether because of Ballarat and everything. But do you think that this contributed to the sense of citizenship, that. That democracy became very differently.
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Sean
Very differently. I mean, the whole rhetoric of the 8 hours movement is very much about, we want, you know, this is a realization of democracy. This will enable us to participate in democracy. There's no point in us formally having the vote if we're. I mean, this is almost. This is paraphrasing some of the speeches. There's no point in us having the vote if we're too tired, too, to read newspapers and to know what the public events are and unable to stand for office because we don't have the time to do it. And so, you know, that sense of democracy not being just a series of formal entitlements, but being an experience of participation, and that participation requiring time was absolutely at the core of the movement.
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Hannah
And so women, of course, didn't get the vote for quite some time, although, you know, earlier here than elsewhere. What's the relationship then between the Eight Hours Movement, women's work, democracy? How did they negotiate that?
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Sean
Yeah, so as. As I've already said that there are women who are commenting on the Eight Hours Movement and saying that it needs to be broadened. They're not being listened to. When women. When female workers become part of the eight hours movement, it happens increasingly from the 1870s, 1880s especially, women are sometimes mobilizing in trade unions. But for the most part, the leaders of the Eight Hours Movement are men who conceptualise the extension of eight Hours work, paid work, to women, as being kind of something that. A gift that they bestow upon women, rather than emphasizing women's capacity to lead these campaigns themselves. And in fact, you see that very clearly in the way in which Eight Hours is extended to women, because the focus is much more on legislation. It's on the idea of we will pass legislation for particular for women themselves, women workers and for children to limit their hours formally by law. And specific occupations where women are concentrated, we will limit the hours for those occupations. And the parliamentary debates are very much framed as well. Women can't really stand up for themselves. And so we, as reforming men, need to do this for them. And then in the 20th century, there are again, women being in the interwar period, in particular unions, particularly textiles, some of the first to win reductions from 48 hours a week to 44. And women's activism through their unionism important and their advocacy is important, particularly women. Some women intellectuals are important. But there is also no question the framing of that reduction is actually strongly in terms of protecting women, because if they work in factories for too long, then their capacity to reproduce is going to be threatened. It's strongly shaped as well by racial politics, because this is the idea that Australia needs more white people babies. And if we have all these working class women working in factories and unable to reproduce, then that will be threatened and the future of white Australia is threatened. So in that way, that's part of some of the big arguments made for reducing hours for women in these years. As I said, from the 1970s, things really begin to change because women in the women's liberation movement begin to push for the idea of reductions in hours as a way of responding to inequalities in the distribution of work in the home as well as in paid work. And so that's when you get a really decisive change where you see women's activism actually changing the. Although it's slowly changing, I think the conceptualization of the issue and beginning to change some of the priorities of the movement as well.
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Hannah
Yeah. And that might end up producing a different set of problems, I suppose, by later in the 20th century, where kind of all those ideas of humanity being attached to time and autonomy might be shifting to being attached to your occupation and your commitment to work and those things. Do you want to talk a little bit about what happens at the end of the 20th century in terms of the language of fairness and that kind of heading backwards, or the great reversal, I think you called it?
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Sean
Yeah, well, I think in terms of language, I think what's really notable is that the question of working time as a collective and social question, which had been at the forefront of politics, I try and show in the book, in the 19th century and actually across the 20th century, as well as particularly labor, governments passed legislation to reduce work from 48 to 44 and from 44 to 40, and there's widespread campaigns. This has seemed to be a major issue and part of the centerpiece of what would be a good life in Australia. That really shifts from the 1980s and the question of working time gets marginalised as a collective and social problem and gets seen to be much more an individual problem. And I think the language of work life balance, which is common in Australia and common elsewhere, there's many ways to interpret it, but I think the way it's most often used is in a kind of individualistic form framework, which is that there's a particular problem of all these pressures and then you as an individual need to find some way to find your balance and that it's up to you rather than it's up to us. Collectively to try and think of what would be better social arrangements for everyone. So that's the big kind of discursive shift and conceptual shift, but I mean, it's the practical shift I think that I try and also draw a lot of tension to in the book, which is, if you think about it, only in 56, 60 hour a week is standard for a full time worker. That's reduced to 40 hours a week by 1948. And then from 1948 through to the early 1980s you get a struggle for a 35 hour week, which in the 70s a lot of people think is on the way to success very soon. And then leads to a compromise of a 38 hour week in the early 80s, still with the expectation that, okay, this will be extended. Instead what you get is from the early 80s, actually the hours people are working begin to increase so that it bounces around from year to year. But from the middle of the 90s on average, people are working something between 42 or sometimes up to 44 on average hours a week. That's not evenly distributed. And some people are working extremely long hours. The other aspect that's happening is that is of unpaid overtime. So in an earlier period when people worked extra hours, they were working for wages by the hour, most of them. And so therefore if you worked extra, you were able to get overtime payments. As more and more people are working in the gig economy or you know, where they're producing their contracts to perform particular tasks rather than by time or as salary earners, then unpaid overtime becomes a huge problem. The Australia Institute, again, it shifts a little bit from year to year, but the Australian Institute research says the last couple of years it's between four and five hours a week unpaid overtime for a full time worker on average. That's one aspect of it, just simply full time workers working more. And then the other aspect is also a loss of control over time, which is the rise of part time casual work and the gig economy. With many people being unsure from week to week how much work they will have and when. It will be a new sort of battle over what workers unions are calling roster justice to try and get some greater sense of security and possibility. And then many workers working part time or casual who actually want to work more and not able to and they need to work more to pay the bills. And then in contrast to a group of full time workers who want to work less but are being asked to work much more. So they're the kind of the broad shifts that have happened.
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Hannah
Yeah, yeah, it kind of coincides with this mass influx of women into employment, especially, I think, in the 1990s. Now, I've been interested with some other feminist labor historians like Eileen Boris, to think about the ways that there has been a wider feminization of the workforce, not just by an influx of women, but by men increasingly subject to the typical working conditions that have been imposed on women from the beginning, I guess. Do you have a view about the gender relationship between this massive influx of women into the workforce and the changing values associated with work?
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Sean
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think you might be able to answer that better than me, Hannah. I guess what I found striking in the book is that this argument that women have put from the early 1970s very strongly that hours needed to be reduced and we needed to better redistribute unequal household labor, that battle wasn't won even though the argument was put. And so as a result, when women did enter the workforce in greater numbers, there were sort of two pathways. One was, okay, we're still doing the vast bulk of household labour, therefore we'll work part time to fit around the household role. That won't be more evenly shared and with all the implications for, you know, gender pay gap and for career advancement. Or we will work full time and we'll also continue to do the bulk of the household labour, in which case, you know, huge problems of exhaustion. So that, again, the failure of a broader kind of institutional shift and a full kind of reckoning with what work is and how it's done has just meant that women in particular, although it's a generalized crisis of wing back time, women in particular are the ones who are suffering greatest. So that's kind of what the book closes with. But your question about the. About how work itself has been feminized. Did you want to just say a little bit more about.
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Hannah
I guess I was, yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways, I think. But thinking about your book, which is what we're here to talk about, so we'll stick to that, as well as fairness about winning back time, there's some other aspects of work that you talk about in relation to scientific management and the loss that comes with a kind of loss of autonomy at work, which I think is part of the human rights that you were talking about earlier. What other ways is unfairness being expressed that are connected to the battle for time, but that are not quite about time?
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Sean
Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of people talk about work intensification as happening alongside the elongation of the working day. So I think that's an important part of it, that it's not just that people are being asked to work more, but the experience of work is becoming one of, you know, greater stresses, greater pressures, less, less time for sociability. I mean, if you just think about the, the again, over my working life, that, that the observation that, you know, that having a break at morning tea or afternoon tea, having a lunch where you would not be at your desk and you would share with, you know, friends and so on, that has now become no longer a norm. You know, it's a special thing for people to decide to have lunch in most workplaces with someone. It's not the norm. And then of course that, you know, in the age of Taylorism and the machine that was setting the pace of work, whereas for a lot of white collar salary earners now, which is, you know, the majority of the Australian workforce now, it's the loading up of extra tasks. So it's simply being have your workload increased without consultation and then having to meet those demands so that the loss of control is within kind of bureaucratic and managerial structures that, in which people feel enmeshed, pressures above, pressures below. And the only way they feel they often can deal with it is simply by working more.
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Hannah
Yeah. And so what do you think the answer is?
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Sean
Well, I mean, I think historians are very bad at, in general at predicting or. But I'd say that, you know, the big one big message from the historical research is that collective action through unions and through political pressure were at the basis of every successful attempt to win back time. And that there were successes. There are really notable successes. If you think about again, the difference between a 60 hour week and a 40 hour week, it's a massive social revolution and the contemporary failures and difficulties and challenges of acting collectively, really profound. But I don't think unless we find a way to do that, that we're going to be able to change our workplaces and our lives.
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Hannah
So join your union. He's the.
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Sean
Absolutely, yes, always.
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Hannah
Oh, thanks so much, Sean. How can people buy your book? What's the Best Way?
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Sean
It's available in lots of bookstores, but you could go to. The publisher is Melbourne Uni Press. So you can go to the Melbourne Uni Press website and order it directly from there as well.
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Hannah
Fabulous. Thanks so much for talking to me today.
- [31:59]
Sean
Oh, thank you very much, Hannah, very much enjoyed it.
- [32:02]
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- [32:37]
Sean
Sam.