THE "six-hour day," or "six-hour shift," is an expression that has caused employers many sleepless nights. It is rather startling, perhaps, to come upon those three little words, especially at a time when strikes are called for the purpose merely of reducing a nine- or even a ten-hour day to an eight-hour day.
What is the six-hour shift plan? A Utopian dream, a plank in the Socialist platform? An attempt to restrict production? By no means. It is the result of years of experiment by one of the ablest business men of Great Britain. William Lever, one of the outstanding figures in the English manufacturing and political world, is no dreamer of abstract, far-distant ideal communities; his object is to increase the efficiency of English labor for the purpose of competing with American trade.
The six-hour shift plan, taken together with the corollary co-partnership plan, is the ...basis of William Lever's campaign. In "The Six-Hour Shift and Industrial Efficiency" he has collected the more important of his public utterances bearing upon his dual plan, and on these he bases his plea for the establishment of a common-sense readjustment of the claims of capital and labor.
William Lever is, of course, something more than a business man: he is a psychologist. "So long," he declares, "as the workman's life is passed in monotonous toil in factory and workshop from daybreak to sunset, no wages, however high, can make up for this separation from all that is highest and best in life; the workman is not content to be exhausted in the task of providing food, shelter, and clothing for himself, wife, and children, with practically no leisure for other pursuits."
It is obvious that the highest efficiency cannot be expected from the laborer who has not time for anything but efficiency. But why six hours? The Englishman does not enter into a long disquisition regarding the exact number of hours that ought to be spent at the machine or in the counting house; he speaks out of his own experience. He says: "But we have learned much during the last three years on the subject of fatigue, overwork, and excessively long working hours. We have proved conclusively that prolonged hours of toil... produce, after a certain point, actually smaller results in quantity, quality, and value than can be produced in fewer hours when there is an entire absence of overstrain or fatigue." Consequently, "We must have a six-hour working day for men and women, and by means of six-hour shifts for men and women we must work our machinery twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four hours per day."
Work the machines, then, twenty-four hours a day, but work the machinists no more than a quarter of a day. Long hours for human beings mean decreased, not increased, efficiency. "We must remember the deadening effect of general factory life....
–The Literary Digest, Vol. 66, Pt. 2 [1920]