- Now Marx is going to look at the length of the working day, comrade. Today, we use the word workday to refer to what Marx called the working day. Not a big diff—just wanted to make sure we understand each other.
- The amount of time it takes for laborers to produce enough to sustain themselves is called necessary labor, and it's a fixed amount of time—you know, unchanging. It takes such-and-such many hours in a given society to keep the workers alive. The amount of time that they work beyond those hours is the surplus labor, and the amount of surplus labor can change depending on the class struggle between workers and capitalists.
- Capitalists want the working day to be as long as possible, so they can make as much profit as possible. And laborers want the working day to be as short as it can be, so they can go home from the job and watch TV or foment revolution or whatever it is they do in their spare time. Pretty straightforward.
- The nature of trade alone—that the capitalist bought labor-power and that the workers sold it—doesn't determine what the working day is. Each has the right to define it as they want, and, Marx says, between equal rights, force decides. Whichever side is stronger gets to call the shots about how long the working day is.
- Surplus labor has existed in societies prior to capitalism. Marx looks at the corvée system, where peasants work for themselves on their own fields for a certain time (the necessary labor), and then have to work on the estate other times (the surplus labor). The two times are neatly separated from one another. Under capitalism, however, you just work at your job and don't see how much of your work is required to keep workers alive and how much of your work is creating profit for capitalists. It's hidden by the nature of the system. And just as the boyars running the corvée wanted the peasants to work as many days for them as possible, so the capitalists want the working day to be as long as possible.
- Marx looks at reports of cheating by factory owners who tried to extend the working day. They'd alter the time work began or ended, or they'd cut meals and breaks short. The designations full-time and part-time today to describe types of employment are examples of the huge role time plays in the capitalist system.
- Next, Marx looks at example after example of workers forced to labor in poor conditions for extended periods of time.
- One example describes a railway accident that happened due to exhausted, overworked railway laborers. Another example describes a milliner named Mary Anne Walkley, whose death following overwork was widely reported. She had to work uninterrupted for 26.5 hours, crammed into a room, and her bedroom was too small and badly ventilated. Marx also discusses the tendency of capitalists to promote cheap, tainted bread, so that workers' food was less expensive and they'd need lower wages. Finally, Marx talks about how the working conditions of some jobs are so bad that they shorten workers' lives.
- Marx points out that if factories are unoccupied during the night, all that expensive machinery is sitting around depreciating (losing value) with no one laboring on it. Capitalists can't abide that, so they make people work nights as well.
- It was often children who were forced to work unusual hours in England during Marx's day. He gives many examples of factories where this was the case, and quotes the owners making excuses for the abuses on the grounds that they have to keep production up.
- Marx says that capital has a blind drive and insatiable appetite to acquire as much surplus labor as possible, and so it will overstep not just ethical boundaries but even health boundaries to make the working day as long as possible. Capitalists will sicken their own workers, thus shooting themselves in the foot, as they try to squeeze out more profit.
- Our communist author looks at the case of slavery in the United States, where slaveowners would just let their slaves die when they developed problems, since the slaveowners could simply buy more slaves. Thus the presence of a surplus population of laborers is one of the chief needs of capitalists. Marx also considers a time in England when a bunch of people in the agricultural areas were rounded up and sent north to work for manufacturers. Basically, in the eyes of capitalists, you're cattle, and the purpose of your life is to work for them.
- Marx says that capital won't care about the health and the length of life of the worker until society forces it to do so. This is because capitalists are in competition with one another. If one capitalist decides to be nice to his or her workers, then other capitalists will out-compete him or her by not being nice, thus saving money and putting the nice guy out of business. It doesn't really matter whether any particular capitalist is a good person or not, Marx argues; the coercive laws of competition, as he calls them, force capitalists' hands.
- Laws now—meaning when the book was published, 1867—regulate the length of the working day and prevent some child labor, but from the middle of the fourteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, when capitalism was getting off the ground, laws forced people to do the opposite—that is, to go to work in the first place. Marx considers some of these early laws, and notes that capitalists had difficulty getting workers to work for long enough. Once the workers had enough wages, they'd simply go home. It took time for the wage system to get sorted out such that people had to work enough to make the capitalists happy.
- Marx quotes an anonymous author of one capitalist tract from 1770 as saying the poor who depend on welfare should be locked up in an ideal workhouse called a House of Terror, where they'd work 14 hours in a day. Marx says this imaginary House of Terror came to life years later in the form of the factory.
- At the start of the nineteenth century, working conditions in the new English factories were cruel, and the working day was long. Parliament passed five Labour Laws from 1802 to 1833 to regulate the situation but didn't fund anyone to actually implement the laws, so they were worthless. The Act of 1833 ruled that the ordinary factory working day was to begin at 5:30AM and end at 8:30PM, and that young persons (between ages 13 and 18) could work at any time of day, as long as they didn't work for more than 12 hours in a single day. There was to be at least one and a half hours break for meals.
- The factory workers sought a Ten Hours Bill to keep their working day to ten hours, as well as a People's Charter to give all men the right to vote. The battle over this continued for years and years. Capitalists found all sorts of ways to cheat the various Factory Act regulations, such as running a so-called relay system to change out who was working when. The leaders of the workers seeking the People's Charter were imprisoned. The court system was rigged.
- Eventually, the Factory Act of 1850 lowered the length of the working day to 6AM to 6PM. The capitalists took credit for it, calling it an achievement of their science that helped them be more productive by having healthier workers.
- Finally, Marx looks at how the struggle to limit the working day in England related to similar struggles in other countries, mainly France and the United States. The working-class movement was progressing in both places.
- Marx says that to resist capital, workers have to put their heads together as a class and force the passage of laws that defend them from having to sell themselves and their families into slavery and death.