Decree on the Eight-Hour Working Day

Nature and content of the decree

The decree was adopted by Sovnarkom (the Council of People's Commissars) on 11 November (29 October O.S.) 1917, immediately after the October Revolution, and is counted among the new government's first decrees alongside the Decrees on Peace and Land issued the same month. Russian-language sources commonly call it the "Decree on the introduction of the eight-hour working day."

Article 2 provided that working time set by an enterprise's internal rules must not exceed eight working hours a day and forty-eight hours a week, including the time spent cleaning machinery and putting the establishment in order. Article 3 guaranteed a free recess of at least one hour no later than six hours after work began, and required machines, drives and machine tools to be stopped during recesses. Enterprises recognized as continuous and working three shifts a day were exempt from the recess rules but had to grant the worker the right to eat during work, and a special eating room was obligatory for work with lead, mercury and similar health-harming materials.

Article 5 defined night work as from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m., and Article 6 barred boys and girls under sixteen from night work. Article 9 banned hired work for those under fourteen and limited those under eighteen to six hours a day, adding that after 1 January 1919 all children under fifteen and after 1 January 1920 all those under twenty were not to be hired. Article 15 barred the employment of women and minors under eighteen for underground work.

On pay and rest, Article 11 set the minimum Sunday and holiday rest for a one-shift day at forty-two hours, with the minimum for two- and three-shift days fixed by agreement with labour organizations. Article 10 listed the holidays when no work was allowed: all Sundays plus 1 January, 6 January, 27 February, 25 March, 1 May, 15 August, 14 September, 25 and 26 December, Friday and Saturday of Holy Week, Monday and Tuesday of Easter week, Ascension Day, and the second day of the Descent of the Holy Ghost; non-Christians could take other rest days in place of Sundays.

Overtime was work done outside regular hours, permitted only under Articles 19 to 22 and paid at double rate. Women and minors under eighteen could not work overtime, and men over eighteen could only with the approval of workers' organizations. Article 22 provided that no worker's overtime should under any circumstance exceed four hours in two consecutive days, and Article 21 set the maximum overtime at fifty days a year for each branch of industry.

Article 25 provided that the law applied to all industries and occupations regardless of size or ownership and to all hired persons. Violation was punishable by imprisonment for not longer than one year, and the decree carried the signature of Yu. Larin, Acting Commissar of Labour. Article 23 nonetheless allowed defence-related organizations, until the end of the war, to set aside the overtime regulations by agreement with management, and defence industries to waive the recess provisions if workers and workers' organizations agreed.

The lineage of the eight-hour demand

The eight-hour day was a long-standing demand of the international workers' movement. In 1817 Robert Owen formulated the goal with the slogan "Eight hours' labour, Eight hours' recreation, Eight hours' rest," and in Britain the 1833 Factory Act limited children aged 9 to 13 to eight hours. In 1866 the Geneva Congress of the International Workingmen's Association declared the legal limitation of the working day a preliminary condition for working-class emancipation and proposed eight hours as the legal limit.

The demand led to May Day. The 1889 Paris meeting of the Second International resolved that workers would demonstrate on 1 May 1890 for the eight-hour day, the origin of International Workers' Day.

Working time in the Russian Empire

Conditions before the decree go back to a July 1897 law. Issued after workers' strikes, it limited the working day of the industrial proletariat to eleven and a half hours; by 1900 the average working day in manufacturing was about 11.2 hours, and by 1904 no more than 63 hours a week, about 10.5 hours a day.

Separately, two weeks after the February Revolution the Petrograd Soviet and the city's manufacturers agreed on an eight-hour day, seven on Saturdays, without wage reduction, requiring factory-committee consent for overtime and institutionalizing elected factory committees. The October decree was a distinct, later act.

Post-war European eight-hour legislation

The decree sits within a wave of post-World War I eight-hour-day legislation. Czechoslovakia introduced it on 19 December 1918, Poland on 23 November 1918 by decree of the Moraczewski cabinet, and Finland in 1917. Denmark introduced it by law on 17 May 1919, Sweden on 4 August 1919 with effect from 1 January 1920, and Belgium followed on 9 September 1921. In Germany the eight-hour day for industrial workers was signed into law during the German Revolution of 1918 by the new Social Democratic government as a concession to the workers' and soldiers' soviets, and was unpopular among industrialists.

In 1919 the eight-hour day was the first topic discussed by the International Labour Organization, producing the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919, ratified by 52 countries as of 2016. Better understanding of labour efficiency and fear of revolutionary movements drove such reforms.

The later course of Soviet working time

The eight-hour day did not last. In the USSR a transition to a seven-hour day and forty-two-hour week was carried out in 1928 to 1933, and a five-day working cycle with a sixth rest day was introduced in the early 1930s. In 1940 a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet restored the eight-hour day with a seven-day week of forty-eight hours across six working days. After the post-war recovery period, working time was again cut in 1956 to 1960 to seven hours with a six-day week, and in 1967, for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, a five-day, forty-two-hour week was introduced.

The problem with calling it the world's first

The decree is often called the world's first eight-hour labour law, but Uruguay legislated an eight-hour day for a six-day week, for any profession, in 1915. Mexico was the first country to entrench the eight-hour day constitutionally, in February 1917, but that constitution fixed aspirations rather than facts, so the eight-hour day and other rights for hired workers remained largely on paper. Spain's royal decree of 3 April 1919 was the first universal law covering all types of work. The decree is therefore best described as one of the first eight-hour laws and the first adopted by a workers' government.

Dispute over the text's origin

The account that the text was prepared before October rests on A. Bykov's own claim. In a letter published in Volia Naroda on 15 November 1917 he stated that the published decree was a verbatim reproduction of his draft law on hours of labour written in spring 1917 on materials supplied by the Party of People's Freedom (the Cadets), and that as published it retained references to the "main board of factory and mining industries," which no longer existed. Because this rests on Bykov's own account, it is not stated here as settled fact.

The 2019 repeal move

In 2019 the Russian government moved to repeal Soviet and RSFSR acts, and Dmitry Medvedev named this 1917 Sovnarkom decree as one of the first such acts. Officials said the eight-hour day is now established by the Russian Labour Code, though Article 91 of that code limits the week to forty hours rather than fixing eight hours per day.