A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay has long been a mantra of Australian industrial relations law and practice. But what constitutes a fair day’s work? The eight-hour day has long been regarded as ‘the Australian way’ but how did it come about? Was it ever a reality for all workers? And does it have any modern-day relevance in the digital age of working from home and gig economy workers. Keith Harvey recently sat down with Sean Scalmer, author of A Fair Day’s Work – the quest to win back time, published in 2025 by Melbourne University Press, to discuss these questions.

The eight-hour day is a celebrated icon of Australia’s industrial relations landscape. The Eight Hours monument opposite the Victorian Trades Hall in Melbourne is a powerful symbol of this very early achievement by organised labour with its 8-8-8 motif. What this meant, how it was achieved and spread and what, if anything, it means today, is the subject of this very readable book by academic Sean Scalmer. Some may be tempted to consider this a mundane subject for a book but the author paints an engaging picture of the initial struggle for an eight-hour day, which then morphed into a demand for what eventually became the weekend – eight hours per day worked on five days a week.

Sean Scalmer reveals to whom this victory applied – and to whom it didn’t. In the second phase of the campaign in the first half of the 20th century, the focus shifted from rights to the sharing of productivity gains brought about by mass production enabled by union action, arbitration and legislation by State Labor governments. This culminated in the 40-hour week in 1948, thus winning the weekend, but progress stalled with only a small further reduction in hours to 38. However, actual working hours have increased with many workers required to work unpaid overtime each week. For gig workers, the very concept of an eight-hour day seems completely irrelevant. The book, therefore, is not just history. It poses important questions for workers and society now and calls for a new approach to the notion of a fair day’s work in Australia. Highly recommended for all those interested in the future of work in Australia.

 

The eight hour day

 

Keith Harvey/JWI: Sean, thanks for agreeing to discuss your new book A Fair day’s Work. First of all, congratulations on this book. As you note at the beginning, the battle over working time has been a fundamental and enduring element of Australia history and you have told this story very well. It is a rigorously researched book and an important tale easily comprehended by anyone with an interest in the subject.
Sean Scalmer: Cheers. Thanks.

KH/JWI: I noticed that in the book there are three phases of reductions in shorter hours of working time. The first one was in the mid 18 hundreds. The second one was in the first half of the 20th century. And then there is the most recent period, which is all awful. But in the first phase around the 1856 period, you mentioned that the demand for shorter hours was based on a notion of rights. I was wondering where the rights were said to come from. Was it a question of ideology, a religious belief, or some other notion that guided these rights that the workers were claiming?

Sean Scalmer: Yes, it was only rarely explicit, and the language of rights was usually deployed quite loosely without defense, but rather with an assumption that everyone would understand what was being talked about. And that’s one of the puzzles and interests for the historian, but it was clear that the assertion of ‘rights was tied to one’s status as a human being and tied to claims about the intrinsic worth of human beings.

Central to the argument was that human beings had certain kinds of core capacities: the capacity for autonomy and to make choices about what you wanted to do in life, the capacity for learning, the capacity for involvement in self-government, and the capacity to build human relationships (because we are social animals. It was suggested that since workers were human beings, they possessed these core capacities, but that long working hours prevented their exercise.

Where did those claims to ‘rights’ and human capacities come from? They were sometimes linked to religious notions, sometimes linked to the status of being a ‘Briton’ – ‘an independent British man’, to use the language of the time, and sometimes simply taken for granted. But it was the ubiquity of the claim to rights and the ways in which it was so rarely contested that I think was most striking to me as an historian. Rights-based claims were central to the mobilisation of the middle nineteenth century. And there were very few cases of critics of the campaign denying that this was a legitimate mode of argument. Rather, the response of the critics would be that this was unaffordable or impractical, not that workers didn’t have these capacities and rights.

KH/JWI: Although where most of these workers had migrated from, the UK, it certainly wasn’t accepted as a right there at that time.
Sean Scalmer: That’s right.
A first for Melbourne, or Sydney?

Keith Harvey/JWI: Yes, so it’s interesting that it happened very quickly. The achievement, at least in the building trades for the skilled workers, was very rapid in March and April 1856 in Melbourne. You told me that you come from Sydney. Can I ask: “Where do you stand on the issue of who won the eight-hour day first?” I always believed it was the Victorian stonemasons in the building industry. I was critical of a book that Andrew Leigh wrote – in The Shortest History of Economics – where he claimed it was in Sydney in 1855. And I thought, that can’t be right. Do you have a view on that question?

Sean Scalmer: Yes. I think that the evidence is very strong that the eight-hour day was won on two job sites in Sydney in 1855. And it’s also true that I think that there were skilled workers in New Zealand who had won an eight-hour day in 1840. So, I think there’s strong evidence that there were isolated breakthroughs in particular building particular work sites. What makes Victoria significant is that it was a much more generalised victory, not just the stonemasons, but the whole of the building industry and that it was eight hours without a reduction in pay, whereas the cases in Sydney were with accepting a reduction in pay. And then the fact that in Victoria it was generalised into a widespread social movement, which persisted and which actually became a model for the other colonies over the decades of the 1860s, seventies and eighties. So, in a sense, people’s identification of Melbourne and Victoria as the vanguard is correct because those 1855 victories in Sydney were so isolated and so hedged around with qualifications.

KH/JWI: I think that’s a fair summation. Going back to the earlier point about the reductions in hours. It was a claim that those workers could participate in society and improve their lot by education. Sometimes it is a little remembered factor that the Victorian Trades Hall today still stands on land which was given to the Trustees of the Trades Hall and Literary Institute. Literary societies sound like a very middle class or upper-class English thing, but it’s an indicator of how important I think that the early trade union movement thought about education for workers, which led to lots of different things.

 

Education for workers

 

Sean Scalmer: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. And that is a story I try and tell through the book about the ways in which the campaign for reduced hours was so intimately tied to the idea that workers wanted to learn, but they were so exhausted from a day of hard labour that extended for 10 hours or more that they found it impossible. And it’s really quite moving to read some of the speeches and letters written by advocates of reduced hours in the 1850s and 1860s when they’re talking about the effort to try and stay awake after a day of work and read and just being unable to do so. Equally, you can see the ways in which some of the early trade unions who won these breakthroughs operated. The stonemasons had their own library where they would share books across the different work sites. And the status of being elected to a position of having responsibility for the Union Library was a highly esteemed office. Likewise, with the Trades Hall itself, the building, the offering of education classes was absolutely central.

KH/JWI: I think it’s important when we say ‘the workers’ though, we do need to qualify as you do in the book that this applies only to a certain group of workers. So, who missed out, who wasn’t really participating in the eight-hour day even as it rolled out?
Which workers benefited, and which did not?

Sean Scalmer: Yes. Well, it was originally a campaign led by skilled tradesmen, skilled male tradesmen who were nearly all British in origin and were white settler Australians. And that implies three levels of exclusion, each of which were challenged over time. The first of those was exclusion based on the recognition of skill. So, it took time for the eight hours to be won by less skilled workers. The second of those was race. And in particular, it’s extremely notable and visible in the record how claims to the rights to reduce working time and the capacity to enjoy those rights and use them were tied to claims about whiteness and about British status and how it was often very directly linked to racist claims about non-white workers, especially Chinese workers and aboriginal workers. And then the third element was gender. And one thing I try and trace in the book is how the very language of the movement for reduced hours in the 19th century and of the eight hour day: ‘eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest’, implied that once you’d finished your eight hours of work for pay, you then had eight hours to rest and to spend in enjoyment.

KH/JWI: There were no domestic duties at all!
Sean Scalmer: Exactly. And so, it took time for, of course, women to lead their own campaigns sometimes with support of male coworkers in building their own unions to fight for an eight-hour day. But then there’s a broader question, which is that the very logic and assumptions didn’t take account of the labours of the home. And that’s still, I argue in the book, a problem for the way we think about working time and working time reductions because those domestic burdens are still mostly borne by women.
‘Early closing’ campaigns in shops

KH/JWI: One of the things I thought was particularly interesting in the book is that you didn’t just talk about industrial workers or factory workers, but you also mentioned shop hours and trying to get reductions in those. So just can you say any more about how those shorter hours in the shops were achieved? I got the impression it was mainly a political and social campaign, but was there any industrial action by shop workers?
Sean Scalmer: It was predominantly a political campaign. The context is one where shop workers are working some of the longest hours.

KH/JWI: Because they just worked the hours that the shop was open. Is that right?
Sean Scalmer: That’s right. And the shop was open for very long periods of time. And in the 19th century in Britain and brought to Australia, there was a system of apprenticeship of shop workers that often involved them living on the premises. And in fact, in the shorter hours movement in Britain in the 1840s the shop workers were actually very prominent, and Graham Berry, who became Premier of Victoria and was a big supporter of the eight hours movement, had been a shop worker and had become politically active in Britain through trying to reduce hours in Chelsea where he was apprenticed as a shop worker. So, there’s a long history of long hours and of especially politically based lobbying and demands around reduced hours rather than self-organization in trade unions and strike action as being central to that campaign for shop workers. And that really is how it unfolds in Australia as well.

It happens later after the demands of skilled workers, and it happens primarily through legislation and public discussion. So, there is a Royal Commission in Victoria into the hours worked by shop employees and factory employees. That’s initiated by supporters of the eight-hours movement who are concerned that those employees working in factories or in shops are working much longer than an eight-hour day. And that becomes a platform for lots of advocacy as well as lots of testimony from the workers concerned, and then becomes the basis of political pressure, which leads to legislation which reduces the hours for employees in shops and factories also for women workers and younger workers. That legislation in its initial form is riddled with holes and is more or less avoided by many employers, which then leads to a subsequent round of legislation, some years later. Victoria is the pathbreaker and its legislation becomes a model for this kind of legislative reform not only elsewhere in Australia, but also internationally. So, for example, the British Fabians look on this legislation as a model when they’re advocating reduced hours in Britain in the 1890s.

 

Winning the weekend

 

KH/JWI: The second phase of the campaign for shorter hours was in the first half of the 20th century. The focus of this phase, as you portray in the book, changed completely. It was no longer based on rights, but on sharing the benefits of productivity. In your reading and research on this, did you get a feeling as to why there was a switch from rights? Because if we go back a step, the eight-hour day was obviously a great achievement. But It was still a six-day week, it still involved working all day Saturday, so it didn’t really leave a lot of time for all these other pursuits, self-education, etcetera, because it only left Sunday. But do you know why the debate changed productivity and became as you wrote “a more dogged and unromantic struggle.” How did it shift into that more prosaic form?

Sean Scalmer: The answer is I think, is that it’s partly a response to the critics and opponents of the eight-hour day and of further reductions. Employers who conceded a 48-hour week were unwilling to make further reductions and argued that further reductions were economically unaffordable. So, this meant that advocates of reduced hours needed to find some way of countering the economic argument. And so that’s the first element of it. The second element is that the achievement of the eight hour a day, 48 hour week, and the rituals around it that expressed this image of the possibility, new possibilities for a rich life, the rituals were founded in the middle of the 1850s, and by the 1890s with the succession of generations and with familiarity, those kinds of rituals and assumptions begin for many people to feel more stale and old fashioned and less lively. So again, the advocates of reduced hours feel like they need to find some way to revitalise the movement.

Then there is the very fact that production processes change. So, as machine production becomes more important, those employed alongside machines and working with machines become more conscious of the costs of that kind of employment, and that becomes more the dominant image of and experience of what it is to ‘work’. So, there’s some attempt to respond to those changes and to build them into advocacy. There is also the changing institutional context. The arbitration courts that are established from the 1890s become a vehicle for unions to make claims for reduced hours, and it’s very clear from the judges concerned, even the more sympathetic judges, that they want in their terms, hard economic data to justify reductions below 48 per week: , they see 48 as to use Justice Higgin’s terms ‘the Australian way’ and something that should be generalised, but beyond 48, they say we need some evidence and some reason to reduce it. So that again, forces attention to the economic question.

 

Sharing productivity

 

Sean Scalmer. The Labor Party at the same time is beginning to pursue direct reductions in hours through legislation, and again, needs to justify how this is economically responsible in the context of election campaigns and criticism from a hostile press and in parliamentary debate. So that again pushes attention to the economic dimension. And then the final one is the rise of social science. Social scientists, particularly from the second decade of the 20th century, begin to study work practices and health and productivity more intensively. And their research suggests that reducing working time may increase productivity, and that becomes an argument that is very helpful to advocates of reduced hours. And so, they fasten upon that. And so all those things together help to make attention to productivity and technology much more central to union and more general community advocacy for reduced hours.

KH/JWI: It struck me when I was reading that the economic statistics and measurement of productivity must have been fairly limited and primitive at the time that we’re talking of: the 1920s, 1930s even.
Sean Scalmer: Yes, that’s right. It was generated partly by the war effort. Particularly in Britain and the United States in the context of munitions factories, the greater employment of women in these factories, and the desire to increase production, governments become much more directly concerned with enhancing productivity and with the health of the workforce. In that context, there was much more measurement and surveying of employee health, employee fatigue, accidents and productivity. And some of that research was cited in Australian cases, and some of those researchers were Australian who then returned to Australia after World War I and were employed in conducting inquiries into Australian industry, particularly the textiles industry.

But you’re right, and that of course raises the measurement of productivity, and raises the question, which is still relevant today, which is actually how reliable are measurements of productivity in any context and in an environment where employers and governments are constantly emphasizing that productivity must be increased. The value of the measurement of productivity is open to question, especially in so many occupations that involve human services. This is an important issue in the contemporary economy where the services sector is so important.

KH/JWI: I thought it was interesting that the first eight hour day movement was so surrounded by the social and cultural context for example poetry and the like, and yet the winning of the weekend doesn’t seem to have attracted the same sort of thing, even though it seems to me to be almost a bigger achievement because having the full weekend off and not just for sporting activities and things like that is almost a bigger change than the first one. But it hasn’t got into the psyche in quite the same way.
Sean Scalmer: I agree. In public imagination, when people think about what the winning of the eight hour day, many people believe that this equates to winning of the 40 hour week. They are largely ignorant of the long and involved struggles to reduce working time from 48 hours per week to 44 per week (creating a ‘half-day holiday on Saturdays) and then from 44 hours to 40 per week. One of the things I wanted to do through the book was to reinstate the importance of these later struggles, which I agree were equally transformative if not more transformative, and suggest that they might actually have some lessons for us today.

 

Working hours increasing

 

KH/JWI: And then we come to the third period where you might say it all falls apart. So, since 1948, the only significant real achievement was 40 down to 38 for most workers. Some got 35 as you point out in a few particular industries. But that’s it, despite the fact – and I’m old enough to remember this – that during the 1980s when the microprocessor was invented it was said there was another industrial revolution. And this revolution was talked about then in the way we now talk about AI. As a result, we were either going to have massive technological unemployment or we were all going to be working 15 or 20 hours a week, and neither seems to have happened, but also what hasn’t happened is any significant reduction in working hours. Why has it stopped?

Sean Scalmer: Yes, I agree with everything that you’ve said, and I’d even add that it is in some ways worse than that, because the problem of unpaid overtime is now a massive problem in our economy, which was not such a significant issue when hours were more fully regulated. In the period up to the 1980s through to the 1990s, I suppose there were fewer employees who worked for salaries, and overtime was more rigorously recorded and rewarded.

KH/JWI: So, working hours are now going up?
Sean Scalmer: That’s right. The Australia Institute research I cite in the books says that over the last couple of years, on average, full-time employees are working on average between four and five hours of unpaid overtime every week. So, it’s a case not only have things not improved very much since 1948 when we had the 40-hour week formally, but actually since the eighties and the formal winning of a 38-hour week in practice most of us are doing more. I think the explanation for why there is an absence of further reductions, I think it’s a very difficult one, but I explore a few contributing factors in the latter chapters of the book. The first of those would be to say that the agents that have been central to reductions of working time across the 19th and then the 20th century were predominantly trade unions, first of all. And then over the period since the 1980s, trade unions have gone into a period of great decline. So, there are obviously fewer union members. And also, up until very recently, the legislative and regulatory context in which unions have pursued the interest of members have been so restrictive that it’s been very hard for them to push for further reductions.

 

Action – and the lack of it – by Government

 

The second institution that was central across the 20th century to reductions in hours was the Labor Party. So, the Labor Party, as I show in the book, in Queensland and New South Wales, especially, legislated for reductions, universal – more or less universal – reductions in hours from 48 to 44, and then from 44 to 40. Since that period, Labor parties, including Labor in government, have been much less willing to regulate for reduced hours. In 1974, the Whitlam government went to the election with a proposal that Commonwealth employees should work a 35-hour week. They were dismissed from office before implementing that element of their platform. And in the period of the second half of the 1970s, Labor parties in both State and Commonwealth politics indicated they were unwilling to support a 35-hour week by favourable treatment of their employees. Bill Hayden was outspoken in his opposition to the 35-hour week. And since that time, no leading Labor politician in any jurisdiction has led a campaign for reductions in hours. So, I think that’s one element of it.

I think the third key institution relevant to reductions in working hours was the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission, which largely played a role of generalising the victories that had been won by industrial campaigns by the more powerful unions. But since the establishment of enterprise bargaining and then the move to a Fair Work Commission with much reduced powers, the industrial arbitration commissions – under whatever name – have quite explicitly been established so as not to generalise victories across the economy.

 

Impact of enterprise bargaining

 

KH/JWI: Do you think enterprise bargaining has played a role in restricting reduced hours? When enterprise bargaining was introduced, I think back in the 1980s, that Business Council Australia said there’d be a 25% increase in productivity. If we did all this, and those gains would be shared, but even if they are shared, and I’m not sure what extent that they have been, at least in terms of reduced hours, but they’re not generalised across the board the way the original eight-hour day claim was.

Sean Scalmer: Yes, that’s right. I think it’s the nature of these kinds of social and industrial shifts that make it hard to isolate an individual agent or moment or policy. But I would simply say that in the period since the establishment of enterprise bargaining, we haven’t had reductions in working time – we have had increases. So, it’s hard to say that it’s helped, that’s for sure. I think theoretically, you could imagine a system of enterprise bargaining in which the more powerful well-organized sectors of the economy were able to use that industrial power to win reductions and for that to become a model for others. But we haven’t really seen that.

KH/JWI: We haven’t seen that yet.
Sean Scalmer: And if that did happen, then the mechanism through which those victories would be shared across the economy with less powerful and well-organised workers becomes questionable.

KH/JWI: yes, well, particularly when private sector union membership is now less than 10%, the ability to share that, to share any gain that is made in other sectors, particularly with non-union agreements and so forth, it’s just very unlikely to occur, in my view. And the other thing that you mentioned before is that we’re going backwards, but there’s also being created a whole group of other types of workers who are not even considered to be employees. So, I’m talking about the gig economy workers and so-called independent contractors, and what does the eight-hour day mean to them?

Sean Scalmer: Exactly. Yes. I mean, I think that’s the combination of the gig economy and people often holding multiple roles that makes the eight-hour day at the moment a distant aspiration for many working Australians. And so I think if we were to tackle the question of reductions in working time, one of the things we need to do is continue, in a sense, the greater regulation, of many different kinds of employment types, and for that to include consideration, a fuller consideration of working hours. If we simply limit ourselves to full-time employees and say we need to reduce their hours, that’s going to leave very large sections of the workforce still struggling with enormous time pressures. So, it’s a more complex challenge because of how employment has shifted over the last couple of decades.

 

Impact of the gig economy

 

KH/JWI: Absolutely. It’s not that long ago that the ACTU had an inquiry into precarious work, and I went back a year or so ago and looked at what they might’ve said about gig economy. Well, it didn’t exist. It was in 2012 that they did this work. Brian Howe chaired it and did all this work. They were talking about casuals, part-timers, contract employees, and the like. But not gig workers. The Gig economy has only been around for 10 years, but the notion of those workers even thinking about an eight-hour day is just not likely to come up in their minds.

Sean Scalmer: Yes, that’s right. I think it’s hard not to despair, but I think the other side of it is that every period of change in reductions in working hours has always involved also widespread cultural argument for the necessity and the justice of the claim. So, one thing that I hope the book contributes to is to continue to renew discussion about what is a ‘fair day’s work’. You do still see elements of this discussion, but often disconnected from discussion about the employment context. So, you see there’s a huge debate, and has been for 20 years at least, about a ‘work-life balance’, but that’s often imagined in an individualised way as a series of trade-offs an individual might have between the different responsibilities they have in the domestic sphere and employment and their interests.

There’s also a discussion since COVID about overwork as a problem and exhaustion as a problem, particularly for women. So I think one of the challenges for those who want to contribute to reduced hours is to make those debates, connect them up with discussions about union power, employee power, industrial legislation, and for people to understand them as collective problems and social problems, rather, rather than just individual concerns that we need to negotiate ourselves.

 

Women workers

 

KH/JWI: In chapter seven, you do talk particularly about the impact of working hours on women. I think the males in the workforce haven’t necessarily been that helpful to assisting women in their campaigns for reduced hours. Did you come across any examples where the blokes have been upfront in supporting women in their campaigns?

Sean Scalmer: Yes, sadly it’s not something that’s been very prominent in the historical record. I mean, one thing that is notable is, and that I was I suppose somewhat surprised by, was how as early as the middle of the 19th century, male employees are saying that one reason we want to reduce our working time is to play a bigger role at home and to connect with our families. And we are sick of going off to work in the dark, returning home in the dark and not playing the role of the father that we’d like to. Recent research on the history of the family shows that since at least the 1970s when fathers have been asked, they say that they would like to spend more time with their families and play a more active role as fathers.

So, there’s a widespread expression among men about the desire to be more connected and play a larger role in the domestic sphere. But at the moment, or so far, that’s been cut off from, again, collective campaigning. So, it’s unquestionably women since the 1970s that have pushed these issues so that now I think we’ve reached a point where most men recognise the justice, the fairness of the case for sharing domestic labour more fully and for domestic labour to be considered as part of a day’s work.
But at this very moment, the tools that have been used previously to reduced hours have now become blunter and less effective. So that’s the real challenge.

KH/JWI: Well, just one last question. You argue in the last chapter that a fair Australia must reflect a new notion of a fair day’s work. What is that new notion?

 

A new approach?

 

Sean Scalmer: What I was talking about in the last chapter is that a point made by women critics of the eight-hour day in the 19th century was that they didn’t work a fair day’s work because their labours in the home often went as long as 17 hours a day. And since the 19th century, they’ve argued that when we think about a fair day’s work, we have to think about all the work that’s done, work for pay, work in the community, and work in the home, especially caring work. If we look ahead to Australian society in coming decades with the ageing of the population, caring work is going to be absolutely central to our society. And that’s got to be included in our sense of what someone’s contribution is and the time they spend at work. So further reductions in working time, paid working time, that take account of our domestic responsibilities and that allow for greater gender equality, seemed to me to be central to the pursuit of a fair Australia.

Keith Harvey/JWI: Thanks, Sean.
Sean Scalmer: Thank you.

Publication details: Sean Scalmer, A Fair Day’s Work, The Quest to Win Back Time, Melbourne University Press, 2025, ISBN 9780522880816, PB, $34.99 MUP: https://www.mup.com.au/books/a-fair-day-s-work/9780522880816

Details of Sean Scalmer’s areas of professional interest and publications can be found on his Melbourne University website: https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/174776-sean-scalmer

Interviewed by Keith Harvey. Note the interview with Sean Scalmer was conducted in person on Friday, 20th February 2026 at Melbourne University. The interview was recorded and transcribed with the assistance of AI but the final text has been manually edited and amended by the interviewer and interviewee. 

 

Declaration of interests

Nil.

Keith Harvey