Sean Scalmer, A Fair Day’s Work: The Quest To Win Back Time (Melbourne University Press, 2025)
Sean Scalmer’s new book, A Fair Day’s Work: The Quest To Win Back Time, arrives with impeccable timing and an interventionist intent.
It is hard to imagine a better moment to release the first dedicated scholarly treatment on struggles over working time in Australia. 2025 has been a year of renewed debate over the prospects of the 4-day week, tussles over work flexibility and the right to work at home, and has been filled with foreboding over new technologies and their potential to displace work and disrupt work patterns. Sometimes historians have to labour to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of their research – Scalmer has no such problem.
But this is not just a scholarly history intending to excavate long-forgotten debates and events from the past. Scalmer has written self-consciously from the perspective of an historian seeking to use historical knowledge ‘to help shape the future’ by informing ‘contemporary debate and action’. Scalmer writes with concern of recent trends towards a more distended working day for large swathes of working people, and the accompanying scourge of widespread insecure and inflexible work (or work ‘flexibility’ that shapes the working day only around employer interests).
His book is intended to demonstrate that this trend is not inevitable: it has not always been thus. In fact, the ‘common sense’ that prevails today over working time ‘was once widely considered a violation of justice’, an abrogation of the human rights of the working person, including the economic right to a life outside of work. It is compelling stuff, based on immaculate and extensive research, and written with real verve and skill.
To prosecute his arguments, Scalmer steps us back to the mid-nineteenth century, and the emergence of the modern workers’ movement, amid its famed mobilisation for the eight-hour day. Before detailing the specifics of that epochal campaign by Stonemasons in the 1850s, and its reverberations in other industries, Scalmer analyses in detail the very concept of a ‘fair’ day’s work.
Scalmer delves deep into the intellectual, cultural, as well as industrial ferment of that era as this term was conceptualised and defined through the process of active social mobilisation: ‘a vigorous cultural and political struggle’. Just what constituted a ‘fair’ day of work? What, in the imaginary of the workers movement, constituted ‘work’ for that matter, and what exclusions accompanied these acts of definition?
Core to his argument is that the struggle for shorter working hours was underpinned by a fundamental claim that long hours were ‘a denial of humanity’. Workers rejected the notion that they should be treated as though they were ‘a slave, an animal or a machine.’ Instead they wanted their fundamental humanity recognised in labour rights – including a right to a life outside of work.
Make no mistake, this was a radical claim. Employees in this era were expected to be subordinated to the needs of their employers. Wages and conditions determined by the abstracted and inevitable functioning of ‘supply and demand’. The collective assertion of the right to shorter working hours and a ‘fair day’s work’, Scalmer explains, ‘opened up fissures in a world of rules and obligations, to enable a genuine exercise of autonomy.’
But this understanding of human rights were proscribed by gendered and racialised logics. As Scalmer shows, the rejection of a slave-like state was bound to racist notions of racial order, as white-male workers sought protections for their human status based on ‘the assertion of a racial distinctiveness.’ The presentation of the ‘vital and creative character of white labour’ was accompanied by the ‘frequent denial of the willingness or capacity of Aboriginal people to work’. A core racist idea justifying racial exclusion, especially of Chinese workers, was that they were ‘enemies of the’ eight-hour day ‘standard’ – efforts by Chinese workers to improve their working conditions were ‘spurned or ignored’ by the white movement.
Scalmer also details the gendered character of the claim. In the campaign to reduce working hours, not all work was considered equal. Domestic labour was not recognised (or, of course, remunerated) as legitimate work. The labour of the home was directly counterposed in colonial gendered ideology to the world of work, and ‘pictured overwhelmingly as a space of female labour and masculine recuperation.’ Crucially (and as is explored below) Scalmer does not present women as passive victims of these attitudes, but agents in creating alternative conceptualisations of what constituted a ‘fair’ day’s work, and for whom.
But even accounting for these restrictions, the claim for shorter working hours constituted a ‘great civil revolution’. Thought it was a revolution that progressed unevenly and with great difficulty: its victories were ‘neither uniform or irresistible’. Scalmer demonstrates how, through a series of industrial struggles (backed at times by political claims) the eight-hour day was gradually expanded to a number of industries through the second half of the nineteenth century, often against employer resistance.
Scalmer argues that a significant shift occurred from early in the twentieth century that turned the focus of shorter hour agitation away from ‘the question of a worker’s human rights’ towards ‘a “scientific” approach – appraising the “productive capacities of the worker as a “human machine”’. This was the product of new ‘scientific’ methods of ‘modern industrial sciences’ that broke down work tasks, calculated an optimal time for each function to be performed, and methodically measured worker output (such as Taylorism). It also reflected the growing influence of the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration and its standards of evidence, as well as the increasing reliance on Labor Parties achieving government, and their capacity to justify legislative action.
Scalmer explores how through these processes, ‘no rejoinder that limited itself to the realm of human value and right was likely to offer a persuasive counter’. Unions, as a result, increasingly ‘responded by leaving for the philosophical for the material domain’ submitting instead ‘economic and financial arguments on the length of the working day’ in their advocacy. Scalmer acknowledges these structural and systemic realities, while bemoaning the loss of a more substantive emotional and philosophical claim on the right to reductions in work time based on this understanding of the human rights of the worker.
Such an approach did have its successes. The book explores, for instance, the multi-episodic pursuit of the modern weekend (a standard working week of 40-hours over 5 days). Reducing the working week to 44-hours (the first step) was of itself an extraordinarily complicated and difficult set of battles, in which both industrial and legislative strategies were deployed. The ultimate success of achieving the 40-hour standard in a 1947 Arbitration Court case (implemented the following year) is detailed in a compelling account.
Up until this point, Scalmer has charted a movement or relative success in the reduction of working hours from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Yes, there were substantive barriers, difficult struggles, unevenness in application and experience across the workforce, and reverses as well as advances along the way. But the general trend was clear, the general standard (for skilled tradesmen) in the middle of the nineteenth century was 60 hours per week. A century later, the general standard for workers was 40 hours. From that point to the early 1980s, standard working hours across the workforce ‘barely shifted at all’ (though some sections of the workforce did achieve striking success in winning reductions). From that point on, the standard working week began generally to increase. What explains this?
Scalmer identifies a number of key culprits: economic restructure, the shift to enterprise bargaining (reducing the power of the tribunal to set general standards across industries to be generalised to workers elsewhere), the rise of insecure work, aggressive employer action, and the reduction in the collective power of workers through the enervation of union reach and influence. Amid this rapid change, the concept of a fair day’s work was downgraded and reconstituted in the public imaginary.
The final substantive chapter is dedicated to considering in concentrated detail an important aspect of the struggles over working time that is suggested elsewhere: the feminist challenge to the notion of a simple demarcation between ‘Work’ as constituting only ‘paid employment’ and the ‘Home’ as a ‘space of intimacy, leisure, and rest’. While Scalmer examines the gendered systemic and institutional settings that embedded these notions, and the attitudinal ones that further entrenched them (including among shorter-hours advocates), he also has a strong emphasis on the agency of those feminists who challenged these strict delineations. This is considered as an act of reimagining of the world of work, an ‘incomplete revolution’.
Scalmer outlines the double burden such advocates have encountered in a quest that was not just ‘the struggle to win time away from paid employment, but also the effort to reimagine’ and to redistribute ‘the work of the household.’ This remains the case, as Scalmer relates the dispiriting reality that even as women’s workforce participation has increased, they continue to disproportionately carry the load of domestic work and unpaid care. Scalmer charts unsuccessful historic struggles to attain appropriate remuneration and recognition for such labour, and the more recent (and successful) waves of advocacy leading to parental and other leave rights.
The book is comprehensive without being overwhelming. Its narrative moves at a rapid pace, but still takes time to immerse the reader in the particulars of place and time (most comprehensively in Scalmer’s detailing of the 19th century, where he has longstanding expertise). Vitally for a work of social/labour history, it is filled with very real and human details, the prose inflected with the texture of life in these moments of mobilisation and struggle. Examples abound, but I was particularly struck by this small snippet of description of a nineteenth century eight-hour day procession, and how workers embodied their professional pride:
Not content with a painted image of the printer at work, the Typographical Society rigged up a printing press, dragged it onto a lorry, and distributed circulars and poems as the ink still dried.
There are points I would disagree with. I think that Scalmer’ depiction of the union movement’s distancing itself from an earlier conceptualisation of the human rights of the worker in the twentieth century is too severe. While he paints a compelling picture of how union claims were made to the industrial tribunals and justified in the press, this does not necessarily reflect how the movement understood its mission and purpose in pursuing these claims.
But this is the most minor of disagreements, and should not be seen in any way as detracting from the considerable achievement of this book. This is a book that will be of great interest to those who pursue these struggles today, and will be read widely. It is filled with lessons, and will prompt debate.
But its greatest accomplishment is even more fundamental. Scalmer’s book is about how real living human beings have engaged in struggle to win back time: their time. To win greater control over their own lives, and to determine how to spend it. To have the fundamental right to be human, on their terms, in their way.
A book like this is vital to remind ourselves of the systems of power that operate to deny the vast bulk of us such basic and fundamental control over our lives, and our humanity. Scalmer’s book is a reminder that collective action and social mobilisation makes history. But such action also creates new possibilities for the future. This book is an invitation to dream of a better future, where we are more innately ourselves because we have claimed greater control over the lives we lead.
This ensures it is a contribution that will be read, discussed, and debated, for a long time to come.
