SEAN SCALMER A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

How many hours comprise ‘a fair day’s work’? Sean Scalmer charts the history of Australian campaigns for shorter hours.

Sean Scalmer has provided us with a history of working hours in Australia. Like other conditions of employment, what is worked in a given day or week is negotiated between workers and employers. The focus of A Fair Day’s Work is the collective campaigns by unions to reduce the time workers are required to work. ‘Collective’ here operates at two levels. The first is the sectoral level, where a particular group of workers, whether at the occupational, workplace, firm or industry level, mount a campaign for shorter hours. The second is the general or macro level, where unions combine to pursue a reduction in hours.

Australian unions have historically made use of a variety of methods to achieve both their ‘sectorial’ and ‘combined’ goals. Industrial relations scholarship refers to how unions will use ‘anything that works’. They have combined collective bargaining with employers and the use of industrial action such as strikes and go-slows with political action and legal action before courts and industrial tribunals. They have also brought into being new institutions such as central trade union bodies and Labor parties at both the state/colonial level and federal level to enhance their ability to pursue benefits for workers.

Political action ranges from governments providing employers with financial aid to defray the cost of a union benefit – as occurred when the Victorian government provided extra finance for the construction of the Victorian Parliament building after that seminal moment in 1856 when stonemasons achieved the eight-hour day – to governments agreeing to reduce the hours of workers in their employ, passing legislation requiring government contractors to employ their workers on shorter hours, and mandating ‘standard’ hours of work for a given day or week. In both New South Wales and Queensland, Labor governments enacted such legislation, with conservative governments often reversing the legislation before a new standard became entrenched and less contentious.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Australia introduced a system of industrial tribunals to resolve disputes. Unions made submissions to these tribunals to reduce hours.

The long-term object of unions has been to reduce hours. Gaining a concession in one instance, they have sought to generalise it across the workforce and establish what industrial relations scholars call the ‘common rule’. The usual approach has been for a more strategic or well-placed union to win a reduction in hours through collective bargaining or industrial action. Once this is achieved, other unions, either individually or collectively through central trade union bodies at the state or federal level, have then sought to spread this to other workers.

Scalmer describes the two-stage campaign to establish a 40-hour week – an initial reduction to 44 hours and then to 40 in the first half of the twentieth century – as being ‘twisted and interrupted … its principal successes were all compromised by qualifications, exceptions and selective reversals’.

Scalmer charts the machinations of the major campaigns for shorter hours in Australia since the 1850s. He begins with the introduction of the eight-hour day by Melbourne stonemasons in 1856, and associated campaigns to establish it as a ‘common rule’. He then turns to the reduction in the length of the working week to 44 hours, with a half-day holiday on Saturdays achieved in the 1930s; then to 40 hours achieved in 1947; and 38 hours achieved in the 1980s. Finally, he examines more recent developments associated with the rise of neoliberalism.

Scalmer analyses these campaigns in their broader political, economic and social contexts. He portrays the initial eight-hour campaign as part of a wider campaign for human rights and increased political suffrage. Its claims were based on the notion of a ‘fair day’s work’.

[Advocates first] contended that long hours were a denial of humanity. Second, that labour contracts should be subordinated to fundamental rights. Third, labour’s rights should be recognised, since labour was a central contributor to the social order. Finally, that a fully fledged human existence required opportunities for activities beyond labour, the experience of freedom, the possibility of education, the cultivation of rich familial relations, participation in self-government.

Scalmer demonstrates how campaigns for the establishment of the eight-hour day ‘rested on political as much as industrial action; the public demonstration, the march, the petition, and the essay were all widely relevant’.

Whereas the original campaign for the eight-hour day drew on ‘humanitarian’ precepts, subsequent campaigns drew on a ‘scientific’ approach which highlighted ‘efficiency’. With the rise of machines and technology, discussions focused on the capacities of workers as ‘human machines’, and how the fatigue of workers induced inefficiency. These issues were explored in hearings before commissions of inquiry and industrial tribunals.

One of the strengths of Scalmer’s analysis is how he compares the workloads of men and women. Historical hours campaigns were based around the needs of white male workers, which had scant regard for Indigenous Australians, workers from China or the Pacific Islands in canefields in Northern Queensland. With the odd exception, little attention was paid to the hours worked by women. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most women were employed as domestic servants who worked from early in the morning to late at night.

His major concern here, however, is the work of women in the home. There was no limit to the time they were expected to spend on household duties. The home was viewed as a place of rest and leisure for white male workers. Scalmer devotes a chapter to problems experienced by women in more recent times as they have become increasingly important in the labour market, which they have combined with running the home. He examines initiatives developed to ease this situation, such as maternity leave and paid parental leave, preserving employment entitlements while on leave, and support for child care. It is difficult to see, however, how labour market reforms or legislation can change the nature of how men and women interact in the home. This is a broader social issue that requires a different type of response.

Scalmer’s final chapter examines developments associated with the rise of neoliberalism introduced by the Hawke-Keating Labor government and continued by subsequent governments. This approach emphasised ‘flexibility’, reducing the role of those institutions that supported workers and the less well-off and enhancing benefits for employers and corporations. It has evolved to include the role of digital platforms to organise and control employment associated with the gig economy.

The period since the mid-1980s has also seen a decline in the percentage of the workforce unionised (from approximately 50 per cent to 13 per cent in 2024). Associated with this has been a ‘fracturing’ in the labour market, with many workers doing more than standard hours, including over five hours of unpaid overtime, while there has been a substantial growth in part-time and casual work, with others working shorter hours.

Covid and technological change has driven substantial growth in working from home, which has the potential to enhance the work-life balance. In his final chapter, Scalmer examines many of these issues, including calls for a four-day week, longer annual leave, child care and so on. The problem with calls for shorter hours is that the major vehicles for pursuing such claims – unions – have been substantially weakened and are on the defensive. And now we can look forward to whatever AI has in store for us.

Today, the problem of working time is dominated by the effort to reconcile work-for-pay with household labour and the provision of care for others … [This] has also coincided with a great decline in the coverage and power of unions, with a more cautious Labor Party; and with reductions in the ambition and authority of industrial tribunals.

On the basis of this it might appear that prospects for future reductions in working hours are bleak. Sean Scalmer demonstrates how changes in hours occur in a piecemeal manner, involving long and arduous struggles mounted on different fronts. His A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time provides a useful historical account of such struggles and various issues associated with changing hours of work in Australia.

Sean Scalmer A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time Melbourne University Publishing 2025 PB 192pp $34.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things. For an account of industrial relations in Australia during the Hawke–Keating years, see his Australian Industrial Relations in the 1980s (Oxford University Press, 1989) and The Struggle For Australian Industrial Relations (Oxford University Press, 1995).

You can buy A Fair Day’s Work from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Australian unions, eight-hour day, industrial campaigns, industrial relations, Sean | Scalmer, unpaid overtime, work-life balance