3. - Limitation of the Working Day
A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day.
It is needed to restore the health and physical energies of the working class, that is, the great body of every nation, as well as to secure them the possibility of intellectual development, sociable intercourse, social and political action.
We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day. This limitation being generally claimed by the workmen of the United States of America,[140] the vote of the Congress will raise it to the common platform of the working classes all over the world.
For the information of continental members, whose experience of factory law is comparatively short-dated, we add that all legal restrictions will fail and be broken through by Capital if the period of the day during which the 8 working hours must be taken, be not fixed. The length of that period ought to be determined by the 8 working hours and the additional pauses for meals. For instance, if the different interruptions for meals amount to one hour, the legal period of the day ought to embrace 9 hours, say from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., or from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., etc. Nightwork to be but exceptionally permitted, in trades or branches of trades specified by law. The tendency must be to suppress all nightwork.
This paragraph refers only to adult persons, male or female, the latter, however, to be rigorously excluded from all nightwork whatever, and all sort of work hurtful to the delicacy of the sex, or
;i The Minute Book of the General Council has "consumption".— Ed.
exposing their bodies to poisonous and otherwise deleterious agencies. By adult persons we understand all persons having reached or passed the age of 18 years.
Endnotes
[140] when the Civil War ended, the movement for the legislative introduction of an eight-hour working day intensified in the USA. Leagues of struggle for the eight-hour day were set up all over the country. The National Labor Union (see Note 339) declared at its inaugural convention in Baltimore in August 1866 that the demand for the eight-hour day was an indispensable condition for the emancipation of labour.