Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Eight-hour day
Summary
The eight-hour day movement (also known as the 40-hour week movement or the short-time movement) was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses of working time.
An eight-hour work day has its origins in the 16th century Spain, but the modern movement dates back to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life. At that time, the working day could range from 10 to 16 hours, the work week was typically six days a week and the use of child labour was common. The first country that introduced the 8-hour work day by law for factory and fortification workers was Spain in 1593. In contemporary era, it was established for non-agricultural workers by Uruguay in 1915, and for all professions by the Soviet Russia in 1917.
In 1594, Philip II of Spain established an eight-hour work day by a royal edict known as Ordenanzas de Felipe II, or Ordinances of Philip II. This established:
An exception was applied to mine workers, whose work day was limited to seven hours. These working conditions were also applied to natives in the Spanish America, who also kept their own legislation organized in "Indian republics" where they elected their own mayors.
In the early 19th century, Robert Owen raised the demand for a ten-hour day in 1810, and instituted it in his "socialist" enterprise at New Lanark. By 1817 he had formulated the goal of the eight-hour day and coined the slogan: "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest". Women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day in 1847. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February Revolution of 1848.
A shorter working day and improved working conditions were part of the general protests and agitation for Chartist reforms and the early organisation of trade unions. There were initial successes in achieving an eight-hour day in New Zealand and by the Australian labour movement for skilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s, though most employed people had to wait to the early and mid twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialised world through legislative action.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.