2023 - M/J - 9489/12 | Q1

Source A

Source B

We propose an eight-hour day. This might decrease production, but our members and their families will be better educated, have more leisure and become better citizens. This will increase consumption. We believe that a man who works an eight-hour day will demand a better home than a man who works longer hours; he will not be willing to live in one or two squalid rooms. He will demand better clothes and food. He will want more books, more education and more of the commodities that work provides. This will bring about a better distribution of wealth and will consequently limit financial panics.

We would like better legal protection for all unions and their members. This would give our organisation more stability and help to avoid strikes by enabling us to settle with employers in a peaceful manner. We are not a Socialist organisation, which would threaten our way of life.

The evidence of the President of the Cigar Makers' Union to a Senate investigating committee, August 1883.

Source C

The steel industry employers are strongly opposed to the steelworkers' demands for an eight-hour day. The twelve-hour day, often for seven days a week, is still quite common in the industry. The employers argue that the eight-hour day will decrease production, reduce wages and therefore reduce consumption. This will increase poverty. While it will give their workers greater leisure, they will not have sufficient income to use it to their, or their families, benefit. The employers maintain that it will lead to a reduction in our nation's wealth. While they agreed that it could increase employment in the short term, it would produce considerable unemployment in the longer term. There would also be a real risk of their prices rising so high that foreign competitors could make serious inroads into our overseas markets. Their hostility to unions remains strong, they are viewed as serious threats to good management, share prices and the national economy.

From a government report to a Senate committee investigating the steel industry, November 1910.

Source D

In labour controversies it was not always possible to champion the cause of the workers. In many cases strikes were called which were completely unwarranted and were fought by methods which cannot be too harshly condemned. Such strikes could bring much harm to the economy. There are good and bad wage workers just as there are good and bad employers. However, we must recognise the enormous economic, moral and political possibilities of unions. We must repress all illegalities and discourage all immoralities of both unions and corporations. We must also recognise the fact that today trade unions are necessary and beneficial. They will enable us to attain a true industrial, as well as political, democracy in the United States. The labour problem is a human and moral problem as well as an economic one. Unions have a role to play in preventing families from want and loss of dignity.

From the autobiography of President Roosevelt, 1913.