The UPA Government headed by Manmohan Singh recently laid a proposal in Parliament to extend the length of the working day under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, from 7 hours to 9 hours.  Workers who enrol in this NREGA scheme will have to work two hours extra to earn the miserably low daily wage. Assocham, the organization of capitalists, has demanded extension of working week from 48 to 60 hours. The 6th Pay Commission has also recommended an increase in working hours.

Ever since the birth of capitalism, a continuous struggle has been going on over the length of the working day.  The capitalist class has not lost a single opportunity to extend the number of hours the employees can be set to work every day, and every week.

The reason why this has been and remains a bone of contention is because the length of the working day is directly related to the degree of exploitation of labour, and to the rate of extraction of surplus value by the capitalists.  Depending on the degree of productivity of labour, a working man or woman on an average produces the value of his or her own labour power of a day in a greater or smaller number of hours.  Let us assume that 4 hours is the time it takes to produce the value equivalent of what is paid as daily wages.  So if a man works for 7 hours in a day, he would be working 4 hours for himself and 3 hours for the capitalist. The rate of surplus extraction, or degree of exploitation, would in this case be 3 over 4, or 75%. If in such conditions, the working day is prolonged to 9 hours, then the worker would toil 4 hours for himself and 5 hours for the capitalist, raising the degree of exploitation to 5 over 4, or 125%.

Prolongation of the working day has been a favourite weapon of capitalists to intensify the degree of exploitation of labour.  For its part, the working class has used every opportunity to restrict the working day, not merely in individual factories or companies but by law in the country and the whole world. 

During the 17th century and during the major part of the 18th century, 10 hours was the normal length of the working day all over England.  Towards the end of the 18th century, the bourgeoise prolonged the working day from 10 to 12 hours, and even to 14 and 18 hours in some sectors of industry.  Such long hours of work were also imposed in the colonies, including India.

The struggle for the 8 hour working day was etched on the banner of the International working class movement, and all its contingents in the different countries. The communists were in the forefront of this struggle.

In the 20th century, the struggle of the working class reached a level of strength on the world scale whereby it became possible to enforce 8 hours as the legally permissible limit in the most developed capitalist countries of the world. The victory of the Great October Socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 was a major contributory factor to this. Terrified of the prospect of the proletarian revolution, the bourgeoisie decided it would be more prudent to give in to this demand formally, even while it would seek ways to circumvent it in practice.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the bourgeoisie launched a concerted offensive against the rights won by the working class. One of the major aspects of this offensive is the prolongation of the working day to a hitherto unimaginable degree. Mobile telephones have made it possible to have workers on call wherever they are and at all times. Computers have made it possible to have workers toiling beyond office hours, at home even late into the night.

Karl Marx said, “In their attempts at reducing the working day … or, where they cannot enforce a legal fixation of normal working day, at checking overwork by a rise of wages, … working men fulfil only a duty to themselves and their race. They only set limits to the tyrannical usurpations of capital. Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalized in mind. Yet the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to the utmost state of degradation.” (from Wages, Prices and Profit).

The working person needs leisure time for mental and physical recuperation, to develop as a social being. Time is needed to contribute to the upbringing of his or her family, and to the running of affairs of society. The capitalist wants the worker to be a machine whose working hours are maximized to squeeze maximum profits. The struggle of the working class for restriction of the working day, to 8 hours and even less in hazardous work, is a just and necessary struggle.