Ten Hours Act (1847)
10시간 노동법 (1847)
The British Factories Act of 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. c. 29). It limited the working hours of women and young persons aged 13 to 18 in textile mills to 63 hours a week from 1 July 1847 and to 58 hours a week, or ten hours a day, from 1 May 1848. It crowned a campaign of almost fifteen years, the "ten hour movement", and in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association in 1864 Marx called it the victory of a principle, the first time the political economy of the middle class had succumbed to the political economy of the working class.
In depth
The Factory Act of 1833 had limited children aged nine to thirteen to eight hours a day and young persons aged fourteen to eighteen to twelve, but it proved hard to enforce. Even before that act, millworkers in Lancashire and Yorkshire had formed "Short Time Committees" demanding a ten-hour day for all millworkers, which they believed would follow in practice from cutting the hours of young persons, since mills could not run without them. Inside Parliament the movement was led by the Tory MP Lord Ashley (later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury), outside it by Richard Oastler.
In 1844 the Commons rejected both a twelve-hour and a ten-hour limit, and in 1846 Ashley's Ten Hours Bill was lost at Second Reading by 193 to 203. After the repeal of the Corn Laws brought down Peel and put Lord John Russell's Whigs in office, John Fielden, a Todmorden cotton-mill owner and MP for Oldham, reintroduced much the same bill in January 1847. It passed its Second Reading by 195 to 87 and its Third Reading by 151 to 88. The fiercest opponents were free-trade Liberals such as John Bright, whose economic doctrine led them to object to restricting the terms on which labour was sold as much as to tariffs.
Millowners used legal loopholes to evade the act and the courts were reluctant to intervene, so that in 1850 Ashley wrote: "The Ten Hours' Act nullified." Only the supplementary acts of 1850 and 1853 established the ten-hour limit in the textile industry, and the economic damage its opponents had predicted did not come to pass. The act as a whole was repealed by the Factory Act of 1874.
Marx cited the act in The Communist Manifesto as a gain won by the workers. In the Inaugural Address of 1864 he described it as carried by the English working classes after a thirty years' struggle, by exploiting a momentary split between the landlords and the money lords. The fight over the legal restriction of the hours of labour, he argued, was part of the great contest between the blind rule of supply and demand, the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, the political economy of the working class; hence the Ten Hours' Bill was not only a great practical success but the victory of a principle.