THE WORKING DAY

Hokitika Guardian, 28 August 1926, Page 1

THE WORKING DAY

"Tlie passion with which trade unionists regard and defend the shorter working day of modern times is entirely unintelligible to our rulers. Yet it belongs fundamentally to the trade unionist outlook,” says the Manchester Guardian, in a powerful criticism of the proposal to restore the eight-hour day for miners. “Not only is the shorter working day the one' conspicuous gain that the workers of Europe have managed to hold out of the gains that came to them with the war, but there is more passion in this struggle than the mere desire, however ardent, to keep this material gain. More than low wages the long working day and the lack of holidays have signalised in the common consciousness of the workers those inequalities of life of which they feel themselves the victims. The great mass of work in the industrial world is done by men and women who have no sensational rewards to expect, whose uninteresting or uncomfortable toil is unillum.ina.ted by any sense of spiritual adventure or the expectation of some brilliant service to mankind. For them the sense of independence, the feeling that they are, as we say, their own matters, rest on the extent to which they can enter into the ordinary life and the ordinary habits of the society of which they are citizens. From this point of view the shorter working day is the chief symbol of the progress that the trade union movement has achieved.”