The time of their lives

There is much to celebrate in the history of the eight hour day and Australian working lives. And there is much to mourn. The struggle for shorter working hours organised around a division of the day into equal parts for labour, rest and recreation is a dramatic story; littered with tales of heroics, of joint partnership between capital and labour, of pageantry and ceremony. The initial cross-class support for the shorter working day, and the later proclamations of Eight Hour Day holidays are testimony of the labour movement’s successes. But as the chapters in this book show, every gain has had to be guarded, complacency checked, and solidarity maintained. Cross-class support and the granting of the ‘boon’ of the eight hour day has been precarious, won in good times, lost in bad. The very premise of the eight hour day, as feminist historians remind us, makes the fallacious presumption that two-thirds of the day can be devoted to ‘recreation’ and ‘rest’. The diverse perspectives that these chapters bring to their specific topics offer an implied challenge to the cosy certitudes of our celebrations by exploring some of the complexities embedded in the relationship between work, social and family life.