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Winning the Eight-Hour Day in Australia: A Social-Movement Explanation for a Precocious Success

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2025

Sean Scalmer Open the ORCID record for Sean Scalmer [Opens in a new window]
Sean Scalmer*
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School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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Email: sscalmer@unimelb.edu.au
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Abstract

Australian workers mobilised precociously to win the eight-hour day. Building workers in Melbourne secured the standard in 1856. They inspired and helped to lead a wider movement that shared in the victory over subsequent decades. By the early 1890s the “eight-hour day” was widely embraced as a social norm. Australian successes were contemplated in a range of international publications.

Australian employees in several trades secured an eight-hour day from the middle 1850s. By the 1890s, Australian advances had attracted considerable international attention. But these precocious Australian successes have not yet been satisfactorily explained. The dominant explanations focus especially on a propitious environment in the middle 1850s, buoyed by the wealth of a gold rush and characterised by labour shortages. These accounts overestimate the persistence of favourable market conditions and underestimate the import of the political context and of creative and determined collective struggle.

This article offers a new interpretation. It suggests that the Australian campaign for eight-hours is best understood as a social movement. It then applies five key concepts drawn from the field of social-movement studies to examine the campaign and to explain its successes: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilising structures.

The article aims not only to explain the Australian eight-hours campaign, but also to demonstrate the value of concepts and approaches drawn from “social-movement studies” to the study of labour history. It is based on a substantial source base, including union records, scores of newspapers, parliamentary debates, contemporary pamphlets, and government reports.

Keywords

working timeworking hourseight-hour daysocial movementssocial-movement studiesAustralia

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International Labor and Working-Class History , First View , pp. 1 - 20
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

The eight-hour day has long held a prominent place in labor struggles. Industrialist and socialist Robert Owen promoted the ideal in a letter to the London press, 1817, also coining the memorable catechism “Eight Hours Labor, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest.” Over subsequent decades, the determined pursuit of the standard mobilized workers across several continents. It was a primary aim of the First International, 1866, and the Second International, 1889. It was a prized achievement of many labor movements across the twentieth century.

In this international movement, Australian workers stand out for their unusually precocious victories. Stonemasons secured the eight-hour day in Sydney in 1855 and members of Melbourne’s building trades achieved a more substantial and general victory in 1856. By 1870, Australian employees enjoyed the shortest working week in the world,Footnote 1 and by the mid-1880s, the eight-hour day was a national norm (if not universally observed).Footnote 2 From the early 1890s, a series of British and European pamphlets and essays looked toward the antipodes in admiration.Footnote 3 This article seeks to document and to explain this precocious success.

While the progress of the Australian movement was comparatively rapid, it was also irregular. The colony of Victoria and its capital, Melbourne, led the pack, though even here the pace of change was relatively fitful and concentrated. The initial victories of the building trades were not successfully generalized for some decades. On the cusp of the 1870s, the President of the National Short Hours League admitted that he was “sorry that the movement had not progressed more.”Footnote 4 It was only over the 1870s and 1880s that the campaign accelerated. Seventeen Melbourne unions celebrated their achievement of the standard in 1875; 20 in 1883, and 34 in 1885.Footnote 5

Outside Melbourne, the major centers of population and industry were slower to win their demands. In 1883, only 10 trade societies took part in Sydney’s eight-hour celebration and 14 in Adelaide. In Brisbane, only 400 laborers and mechanics joined in the annual procession at this time. Perth lagged further behind: the first public meeting to establish an “Eight Hours Association” was not organized until 1886.Footnote 6

Even granted the unevenness of the advancing movement, these successes were striking when considered in international terms. How were they secured? There is currently no consensus. Contemporary comparative scholarship registers the Australian victories but does not attempt to explain such precocity.Footnote 7 Australian labor historians – invariably close to the movement – have often been more concerned to narrate and to celebrate achievements than to explain.Footnote 8 Important if now rather aged research has documented the chronology of events and the background of leading activists.Footnote 9 Written in a narrative mode, it has not always specified its hypotheses and advanced clear explanations.

Two weakly articulated hypotheses are present in earlier studies: the contextual and the organizational. First, the contextual: economic historians have often linked the success of the hours movement to the high wages also enjoyed by Australian employees, and to the buoyancy of the Australian economy.Footnote 10 Labor historians have also accepted the broad picture of comparative prosperity. They have emphasized that a massive gold rush of the early 1850s ensured high wages, thereby raising new industrial questions, such as working time.Footnote 11 According to such a view, the success of the Australian labor movement largely reflects the propitious environment.

This hypothesis does not bear close scrutiny, for the demand for labor and the relative affluence of working Australians does not map directly onto the rhythms of the eight-hour campaign. Victoria was both the center of the gold rush and the most significant site of eight-hour mobilization. But the demand for labor in Victoria was at its height in 1853, when wages also reached their peak, and the Victorian economy suffered a collapse in 1854; wages dropped by about one-third, and unemployment persisted through to the winter of 1855. Australia’s first economic historian, Timothy Coghlan, describes 1856 – the year Melbourne’s tradesmen led their celebrated struggle – as only “fairly prosperous” for Victorians, while 1857 was “a very trying one for the working classes.” In 1858, many tradesmen suffered unemployment, and several employers sought to reimpose a ten-hour day. The economy was no better in the early 1860s, and wages steadily declined.Footnote 12

In comparative terms, the lot of Australian workers remained much better than that of employees elsewhere in the world.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, the simple equation of gold-rush prosperity with eight-hour success cannot be sustained. The unevenness of the demand for labor and the timing of eight-hour victories suggest the need for a more complicated explanation.

A second hypothesis emphasizes Australian labor’s comparatively advanced industrial organization. Early research into the eight-hour movement identified the importance of key organizations.Footnote 14 It established that the success of early campaigners – especially the stonemasons – encouraged other employees to form trade unions, in turn providing them with the collective force necessary to secure their demands.Footnote 15 More recent scholarship has further established the significance of a long-standing movement to reduce hours, associated with organizations dedicated to the “early closing” of shops and to a “half-day” holiday.Footnote 16 The sophisticated scholarship of Michael Quinlan has embedded the eight-hour campaign in a wider history of working-class mobilization. It has systematically documented the number, range, and actions of working-class organizations. And it has given special attention to the role of coordinating institutions in the eight-hour campaign.Footnote 17

While working-class organizations unquestionably played an important role in the success of the eight-hour movement, acknowledgement of their significance nonetheless leaves several matters unresolved. If organizations were central to eight-hour victories, then why is it that Australian workers were more inclined to form organizations than employees in other lands? Why were their efforts more successful? Was the presence of organizations sufficient to explain success? Or did organizational strategies also play some role? Did the ways in which organizations framed the question of “eight-hours” contribute to success or failure? What about the collective actions that they sponsored and undertook?

Building on the insights of the “organizational” hypothesis, but seeking to interrogate the further questions it inspires, this article more deeply probes the history of Australia’s eight-hour struggle. Its analysis rests on substantial newspaper, archival, and contextual research. But it also draws upon a relatively unexploited and even unfamiliar intellectual framework for most labor historians: the interdisciplinary field of “social movement studies.”

Social-movement studies and labor history

Emerging from the 1970s, the field of “social-movement studies” developed as an academic sub-discipline in the context of student dissent, the rise of liberation movements, and the relative demobilization of the organized working class. In consequence, the study of “social movements” and of “labor history” has often been defined in opposition to one another. Canonical figures within the “social-movement studies” have sometimes drawn distinctions between “historical movements” and contemporary “social movements.”Footnote 18 They have emphasized the transformative character of so-called “new social movements,”Footnote 19 or of more recent “alter-globalization” movements.Footnote 20 This has implied that the methods and approaches developed for the study of contemporary campaigns have little relevance for the historical study of labor and working-class movements. A sampling of the leading journals – Mobilization and Social Movement Studies – establishes only a handful of contributions to the historical study of working-class campaigns.

Nonetheless, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that “social movement studies” and “labor history” remain completely disconnected. Historical-sociologist Charles Tilly (1929-2008) was for several decades one of the major figures in the study of social movements. He also exhaustively documented the collective action of workers and peasants across several centuries, using many thousands of rigorously compiled “event catalogues” to support his claims.Footnote 21 Tilly co-wrote a notable study of strikes in France.Footnote 22 His contribution to International Labor and Working-Class History, “Globalization Threatens Labor’s Rights,” was in early 2025 the journal’s most-cited contribution.Footnote 23 And his scholarship has inspired emulation in a later generation of students interested in industrial relations and working-class politics.Footnote 24

John Kelly’s Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998) is perhaps the most significant work of labor-related research that has deeply engaged with Tilly’s scholarship, and with the broader literature on “mobilization” of which it forms the most prominent part. Kelly’s book has had a profound impact on the discipline of industrial relations; it has been cited more than 2000 times, and its key insights have been included in leading textbooks and in trade-union education.Footnote 25 But the book’s engagement with the field of social-movement studies is limited: it is inspired by Tilly’s contributions published in the 1970s and by allied scholars in the 1980s up to the mid-1990s.Footnote 26 Understandably, it does not reflect the advances in social-movement studies pioneered over the last three decades. And as the work of an “industrial relations” expert, it has not had a major influence on the discipline of history, as such.

Several historians have emerged as notable skeptics of Tilly’s work. Some have criticized his allegedly teleological approach to history,Footnote 27 even dubbing it an updated form of the “‘modernization’ thesis.”Footnote 28 Others have accused Tilly of inattention to culture,Footnote 29 or have suggested that his analysis of collective action is too narrow.Footnote 30 A survey of British research on the history of protest, published in History Workshop Journal in 2012, identified a growing rejection of Tilly’s supposedly “reductionist” and “quantifying” approaches, celebrating rather an interest in “hidden transcripts of protest,” as pioneered by the anthropologist James C. Scott.Footnote 31 Few historians have been bold enough to emulate Tilly’s interrogation of long-term change.

Largely unwilling to engage with the most historically minded scholar in “social movement studies,” labor historians have overall shown little curiosity in the broader field of research. While German historian Stefan Berger has vigorously led an effort to connect social movements and historical research, this has not so far elicited widespread emulation.Footnote 32 In consequence, labor historians have largely forfeited the possibilities and insights that “social-movement studies” might provide.

This article aims to challenge this neglect. I aspire to explain the precocious success of Australia’s eight-hour movement. I aim to do so by drawing upon the wide palette of social-movement studies.

Explaining the Australian eight-hour movement: Five dimensions of social movements, in theory and in practice

A rich and dynamic field of scholarship, social-movement studies hosts a number of competing paradigms. Five approaches to the study of social movements offer insight into Australian labor’s eight-hour campaign: political opportunities; framing; strategy; repertoire; and mobilizing structures. Each paradigm has a rich intellectual history and a substantial scholarly literature. In the pages that follow, I briefly introduce each approach and consider it in the Australian case. I argue that each provides insights into the pattern of Australian mobilization, and that together they offer a fuller explanation of Australian labor’s eight-hour success.

My analysis of the Australian movement does not rest simply on a contrast between the Australian breakthrough and more laggardly advances in Europe and North America. It also rests on inter-colonial comparisons. The Australian movement made much more rapid progress in the colony of Victoria, and its capital city, Melbourne, than in other colonial polities. In consequence, a close comparison of Victoria with the other colonies can help to explain the conditions and processes that drove successful mobilization.

Political opportunity structure

Charles Tilly famously drew attention to political opportunities in his study of peasant resistance to the French Revolution, The Vendée. Tilly established that this popular mobilization was not a direct reflex of material deprivation or clashing values, but rather reflected the complexities of local political organization and power, marked by great variety and by selective alliance.Footnote 33 Tilly’s emphasis on the importance of the political context was shared by students of urban American riots and mobilizations of the 1960s.Footnote 34 In his generalizing sociological work of 1978, From Mobilization to Revolution, Tilly began to build these insights into a more comprehensive theory.Footnote 35

Two of Tilly’s colleagues and eventual collaborators, Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, extended Tilly’s approaches in studies of political contention in the twentieth century.Footnote 36 By 2002, attention to what was now called the “political opportunity structure” had become so common that one scholar was able to coordinate a review of the theory through an analysis of one-hundred monographs, covering social movements that spanned centuries and continents.Footnote 37

Sidney Tarrow’s definition of a “political opportunity structure” has been widely accepted: “consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political environment that provide incentives for collective action by affecting people’s expectations for success or failure.”Footnote 38 As specified in sociological analysis, scholars conventionally identify several elements of the political environment as conducive to mobilization: increasing access to power; shifting alignments; divided elites and influential allies.Footnote 39

How might this apply to the Australian eight-hour campaign? Australian workers of the 1850s enjoyed favorable opportunities for mobilization. In the mid-1850s, colonists secured responsible government and legislative independence from Britain. The colonial constitutions codified at this time largely extended the democratic rights the Chartists had unsuccessfully sought from the late 1830s: manhood suffrage for the lower house; removal of property qualifications for election to the lower house; the secret ballot. This granted workers greater access to power, especially as compared with workers in Britain and Europe.

The political context in Victoria was especially open to popular pressure. Seized from its Indigenous inhabitants without a proper treaty or negotiation, the lands of modern Victoria were recognized as a separate British colony in 1850. The colony was galvanized by a massive gold rush soon afterward. Its population grew from 77,000 in 1851 to 539,000 a decade later and to 730,000 a decade after that; it was by 1871 more than forty percent more populous than the colony of New South Wales.Footnote 40 The sudden influx of wealth and of people disrupted social and political hierarchies.Footnote 41 The colony’s many immigrants – including from the Republic of the United States and from China – granted it a restless and cosmopolitan character. Its enormous wealth endowed new public institutions with many resources. This helped to foster an active public life, marked by a relatively optimistic culture, confident of the possibilities of social amelioration.Footnote 42

The openness of electoral contests and the importance of the working-class vote opened up the possibility of influential allies for an eight-hour campaign. From the mid-1850s, aspiring politicians in Victoria increasingly pledged their support to the eight-hour standard. This was a practice encouraged by dedicated organizations of working men, who put the matter to candidates at public meetings and in electioneering circulars.Footnote 43

The Victorian lower house soon contained several advocates of an eight-hour day, including politicians who had personally experienced long hours of manual labor.Footnote 44 The trend accelerated from 1870, when a system of parliamentary pay enabled the election of more members of the lower middle-class and the skilled trades. Such an arrangement distinguished Victoria from the other major colonies, as payment of members was not instituted until 1886 in Queensland, 1887 in South Australia, and 1889 in New South Wales; other colonies came still later.Footnote 45

As a result of these differences, the Victorian parliament was for several decades much more democratic in membership and spirit than its inter-colonial comparators. Over the broad sweep of the nineteenth century, Victoria’s political leaders increasingly advocated state intervention into the economy and society: a “new” or “colonial” liberalism in contrast to the classical liberalism of the metropole.Footnote 46 Its most prominent reformers also played a central role in the federation of the colonies into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. Their political experiments, particularly their willingness to regulate the conditions of employment, influenced progressives in the United States and in Britain.Footnote 47

The contrast with the colony of New South Wales was especially pronounced. For several decades, that colony’s only significant legislator from a working-class background was the former ivory-turner, Henry Parkes. A dominant figure in politics for more than four decades, Parkes proselytized for “free trade” and proved unwilling to support governmental action that might promote an eight-hour day. He “denied that Parliament had the power to fix the number of hours any man should labor.” To do so, Parkes argued, would be “an act of tyranny.”Footnote 48 So dismissed by legislators such as Parkes, the eight-hour movement outside Victoria possessed fewer influential friends.

Political opportunities outside parliament were perhaps more significant for an eight-hour campaign. Here, the Victorian environment was again particularly propitious. In the early 1850s, gold-seekers in Victoria had mobilized against police harassment and for greater political rights; the process reached a violent peak in the “Eureka rebellion,” which left more than a score of miners dead in December 1854. The miners were supported by large, peaceful, urban gatherings, largely understood as an expression of “moral force.”Footnote 49 In the first years of colonial self-government, these tumultuous political energies were channeled into a campaign for the redistribution of land. From 1857, a Victorian “Land Convention” served as an alternative to the formal parliament, and its members sustained a vigorous challenge for several years afterward. This extended to a habit of public assembly and of “stump oratory” – especially in central Melbourne – sometimes attracting thousands of auditors.Footnote 50

Public life in the other Australian colonies was, in the mid-nineteenth century, considerably less energetic and involving. The practice of stump oratory took much longer to develop outside Victoria and was not widely identified in public debates elsewhere in Australia until the early 1880s.Footnote 51 The colony of South Australia at first even banned election speeches of all kinds.Footnote 52 In consequence, campaigners for an eight-hour day had less opportunity to advocate the cause and to intervene in electoral contests.

Australians were more literate than residents of Great Britain and Ireland, and Victorians were more literate than residents in the other Australian colonies. The colony hosted a vibrant newspaper press that has drawn the attention of global historians. Rural newspapers supported radical movements and candidates. In Melbourne, the Age newspaper was a strong supporter of the eight-hour system and a major political force. By the 1880s, it had won such popular acclaim that its circulation outstripped its conservative rival, the Argus newspaper, by a factor of four.Footnote 53 By contrast, no leading newspaper in Sydney directly supported the eight-hour campaign.

The openness of the public sphere and the political system, combined with the freedom to assemble, agitate, and organize, gave working-class men in Victoria ample opportunities to assert their interests. This proved decisive, for at crucial moments in the eight-hour campaign, activists were able to call upon the state to reinforce their demands.

Three moments were especially notable. First, when building workers mobilized in 1856, and when influential employers resisted, the Victorian colonial government offered monetary recompense to these employers, so that they bore no financial loss from accession to the new system.Footnote 54 Second, when campaigners sought to generalize the standard beyond skilled tradesmen, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, the Victorian colonial government led the way, mandating that all government contracts would insist on adherence to an eight-hour day.Footnote 55 Third, when campaigners emphasized the longer hours worked in shops and in factories, in the early 1880s, the Victorian government instituted a Royal Commission to investigate. This encouraged further attention, mass mobilizations, and inspired eventually remedial legislation that would limit working hours for certain employees (women and children employed in factories) and certain occupations (mandating closing times for shops).Footnote 56

Favorable political circumstances help to explain the rapid winning of the eight-hour day. Any explanation that neglects the advantageous political environment overlooks the significance of political opportunities. Nonetheless, Australian employees made ample use of these opportunities, framing original arguments for the justice of their cause.

Framing

Two American scholars, David Snow and Robert Benford, introduced the concept of “framing” to social-movement studies in the late 1980s. Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974) they drew attention to the ways in which political campaigners actively interpret their world: assigning meanings to events and social conditions so as to mobilize adherents, win support, and counter antagonists. Snow and Benford’s analysis emphasized three processes as central to social-movement framing: diagnosis (identifying problems and assigning blame), prognosis (proposing solutions and strategies) and motivation (providing a rationale for collective action).Footnote 57 Their insights helped to stimulate a larger body of research that generated additional concepts, that tied “framing” to other approaches to social movements, and that identified “frames” in a variety of social movements, contemporary and historical.Footnote 58

The Australian movement for the eight-hour day discloses the movement’s vigorous, persistent, and persuasive framing of the question of working time. In letters to the editor, mass meetings, lectures, essays, and poems, campaigners explained to the community why an eight-hour day was urgent and necessary.

Campaigners for eight hours diagnosed the problem of a distended working day as more than an industrial question, but as a denial of humanity. This “diagnosis” rested on the notion that the requirement to work long hours reflected an employee’s treatment as a slave, an animal, or a machine. The employee, it was argued, was overridden like a horse,Footnote 59 or directed to labor as if “near-machine”: “ever working, resting never.”Footnote 60 References to “slavery” or serfdom were still more common.Footnote 61 The British Parliament had only passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. The equation of paid employment with slavery was a means of dramatizing the deprivations many workers endured. It was also tinged with racial anxieties, so that long hours were described as “White Slavery” and oppressive employers were “n — drivers.”Footnote 62

Countering the denial of their humanity, campaigners for an eight-hour day presented their cause as a quest for “rights.” This was the “prognosis” of the movement. Labor’s spokesmen emphasized that they sought not a “boon” or a “privilege,” but a “right,” an “undiluted right,” the “absolute principle” and “the principle in the abstract.”Footnote 63 Some even compared the claim for a fair day’s work to the imagined foundation of British liberties, the Magna Carta of the thirteenth century.Footnote 64

The claim for “rights” was a means of countering the authority of liberal champions of a free market in human labor. Local campaigners rejected what they called such “philosophers and politico-economists.” They denied that “supply and demand” constituted a “law of nature,” to which human rights must be subordinated. William Trenwith, bootmaker and union leader, put it most directly to a meeting of felt hatters at Victorian Trades Hall:

It was not to be supposed that the laboring man was amenable to the laws of demand and supply in exactly the same manner as articles of commerce.Footnote 65

The assertion of the rights of the worker was embedded in a claim to labor’s centrality and significance. In speeches to promote the eight-hour day, labor was consistently extolled as “the greatest and most important part of our social system,” and workers “the heart’s blood of the colony.” The sentiment was glorified in poetical voice and song. One poem composed for the eight-hour day demonstration contended that “Labor is the crown of life.” Another hailed “Labor – Lord of All.”Footnote 66 A third anticipated Bertolt Brecht’s “Questions From A Worker Who Reads” in its recovery of the human skill and effort that raised the great monuments of classical civilization:

Who cut the marble gems of Greece –

Frieze, Column, Temple, Tomb?

Who carved the graceful capital,

Evolved from ancient gloom?

Who reared the mighty Pyramid?

Great Babylon so gay?

But men like us, with chisel, trowel,

Who keep this EIGHT-HOUR DAY.Footnote 67

The “diagnosis” of a denied humanity and the “prognosis” of a claim for labor’s rights were matched by a “motivation” that underlined the possibilities of reduced hours. Campaigners for a shorter working day elaborated in rich detail the possibilities of a human existence liberated from the workbench or shop counter. They emphasized that the employee might gain an unaccustomed access to science and literature: no longer too exhausted to read or study.Footnote 68 They stressed that with a shorter day, workers might practically exercise the formal rights of political citizenship they had recently secured:Footnote 69 a means of “enabling the working classes to exercise their franchise independently.”Footnote 70 And they suggested that a shorter period at work would promote the better fulfillment of the “duties of husband and father,”Footnote 71 and the greater richness and cohesion of family life.Footnote 72

Cumulatively, the eight-hour movement’s framing of the problem of working time, and of its solution, helped to win many adherents to the cause. It also helped to sway colonial public opinion. And it countered opponents, who habitually sought to stress the primacy of the market. Labor’s spokespeople persistently and creatively advanced their interpretation in many venues. They did not limit their efforts to persuasion, however. They also struggled directly for their rights, deploying a highly sophisticated political strategy.

Strategy

Academic studies of social movements were traditionally detached from practical and strategic matters,Footnote 73 but over the last two decades, a developing current of scholarly research has sought to address such detachment. It has emphasized the intellectual importance of the “activist wisdom” generated by campaigners, and has directed attention to “strategy” as a problem for investigation.Footnote 74 American scholar James Jasper has pioneered this development, placing the practical decisions, interactions, and dilemmas of activists at the center of analysis.Footnote 75 Attention to the strategic dimension can aid understanding of Australia’s eight-hour campaigns.

Across Australia and New Zealand, the interest in reduced hours of labor was common. However, most campaigners of the 1840s and early 1850s sought immediate victories that rested on the mobilization of relatively small and restricted groups of skilled tradesmen. New Zealand led the pack, and tradesmen based in Wellington won an eight-hour day as early as 1840.Footnote 76 In Hobart in October 1855, members of the building trades as well as shop workers secured a half-holiday from more than 70 employers. In Brisbane, tradesmen grouped together to insist on the cessation of work as the sun set.Footnote 77 In Sydney, stonemasons building the Holy Trinity Church and the Mariners’ Church managed to secure an eight-hour day in the second half of 1855, celebrating with a banquet in October.Footnote 78

These mobilizations were highly sectional; the gains they won were constrained and often ephemeral. Workers in Melbourne, by contrast, were slower to take action but more devoted to a generalized campaign. This strategy brought greater and more sustained success.

Initiated by the stonemasons in early 1856, Melbourne’s eight-hours movement was soon a broad front across the construction industry. Members of “the building trade in general” gathered together at a meeting in the Queen’s Theatre on 26 March 1856. Along with masons, carpenters, bricklayers, builders, and sawyers all spoke. It was there resolved that “the time has arrived when the system of eight hours per day should be introduced into the building trades”; April 21st was suggested as the day of enactment. A second meeting on April 11, invited “all trades, professions or occupations whatever” to “fully and fairly discuss” the “expediency and practicability of abridging the hours of labor to eight hours per day.” That successful gathering confirmed that unionists should work only eight hours from April 21. It also led to the formation of a committee representing masons, carpenters and joiners, bricklayers, plasterers, and laborers. The committee set up what was described as “permanent quarters” at Collingwood’s Belvidere Hotel. This meant that members of the building trades were prepared to act collectively across their industry. The breadth of labor’s organization granted it great power and force.Footnote 79

The contrast with Sydney is notable. Here, the campaign was more fitful, less generalized, and less successful. Though stonemasons at two worksites were the first to attain an eight-hour day in August 1855, a more general struggle across the trade was not systematically waged until February 1856.

The Melbourne eight-hour campaign was also distinguished by its members’ insistence on the imposition of a common rule. Whereas Sydney stonemasons accepted variable arrangements on different worksites from their first victories in August 1855, Melbourne stonemasons dedicated their campaign to the attainment of a uniform standard across the trade. This insistence was most memorably evinced on 21 April 1856, when the vast bulk of employers conceded an eight-hour day, but when employers charged with the construction of Victoria’s parliament house and Melbourne’s western market held out against the demand.

James Stephens, then helping to build The University of Melbourne, claimed to mastermind the collective response:

It was a burning hot day, and I thought the occasion a good one, so I called upon the men to follow me, to which they immediately consented, when I marched them to a new building then being erected in Madeline Street, thence to Temple Court and on to Parliament House, the men at all these works dropping their tools and joining the procession.Footnote 80

Tradesmen ceased work until recalcitrant employers were brought to heel. This was not a strike in their own direct interests, as stonemasons readily explained; those taking action already possessed the eight-hour day. It was rather an insistence that there would be what workers called a “general rule” in the industry – that eight hours would be “universal in its operation.”Footnote 81 Such a display of determination brought victory within little more than a day. But the symbolism was as important as any immediate practical effect. Workers affirmed their shared attachment to the principle of an eight-hour day, their willingness to sacrifice for its common enjoyment, and their capacity to enforce their demands. These signified to employers the difficulty of seizing back the freedoms that workers had won. They also served to model a form of joint action that would bring much future success.

The repertoire of contention

Students of popular politics have long examined the complicated histories of protest and collective action; British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé pioneered this interest from the late 1950s and 1960s. Their pathbreaking works largely adopted a developmentalist logic, under which protest was said to have shifted from “archaic” or “primitive” forms (such as riots and peasant uprisings) to the techniques of the “modern social movement,”Footnote 82 and from “pre-industrial” protest actions to “industrial” collective action: allegedly more disciplined and “significant.”Footnote 83

From the late 1970s, Charles Tilly greatly extended this scholarship, methodologically and conceptually. Adopting a more rigorous process of data collection, he gathered from primary sources thousands of records of contentious events, spanning several centuries. He organized these data through highly detailed “event catalogues.” He then interpreted the findings through the new concept of the “repertoire of contention.”Footnote 84

The concept of the repertoire was based on the insight that collective action might take on many forms – from a strike, to an act of sabotage, to an assassination, to a fast, and beyond – but that in practice participants tended to adhere to a relatively limited range of contentious performances. Like a troupe of musicians who worked from a standardized repertoire, political actors relied on familiar routines, and changed them only bit by bit. While Tilly’s approach has attracted some cogent criticisms,Footnote 85 it has had an immense influence on “social-movement studies.”Footnote 86 It has even inspired significant research in Australian colonial history.

In a series of innovative studies, historian Michael Quinlan has applied a modified version of Tilly’s approach to working-class mobilization in Australia: The Origins of Worker Mobilisation, from 1788 to 1850, and Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation, from 1851-1880.Footnote 87 Quinlan definitively established that Australian workers undertook a range of collective performances from the later eighteenth century, including absconding from work, petitioning, and placing bans on work. Convicts went on strike, as did free laborers. There were strike waves in 1826, 1840, and (to a lesser extent) in 1847.Footnote 88 In consequence, when employees increasingly took up the question of the eight-hour day, from the 1850s, they were able to call upon a well-developed repertoire of collective performances.

Quinlan found that working hours were the “most pivotal” cause of workers’ mobilization, 1851-80.Footnote 89 He uncovered a great variety of contentious action (from assault, to sabotage, to picketing, and more), but he underlined the centrality of a cluster of collective performances: strikes; the making of demands; public demonstrations; unilateral regulation (in which workers, through their unions, enforced working conditions and processes); and the allied practice of “craft/skill control.”Footnote 90

These tactics were shared across the colonies. However, the eight-hour movement in Melbourne was especially adept in its use and adaptation of the key methods of public demonstration and pressure. Supporters of an eight-hour day promoted the cause through a series of major public meetings and lectures. These efforts culminated in a succession of large gatherings of tradesmen in late March and mid-April 1856, which attracted several hundred participants and were widely reported in the colonial and inter-colonial press.Footnote 91 They collectively signaled the determination of workers, solidified unity, popularized movement “frames,” and helped to establish wide community support.

The apparent achievement of an eight-hour day in the building industry, 21 April 1856, promoted further contentious performances to help safeguard the victory. In early May 1856, unionists resolved at a public meeting to celebrate their success and to proclaim its import. A fête in the Cremorne Gardens, Whit Monday, was agreed. It was preceded by a procession through the city, as perhaps 1,200 tradesmen walked in irregular file, behind a large tricolor flag. At the gardens, as many as 3,000 gathered for dancing and fireworks. These celebrations were revived on the first anniversary of the victory, and the procession and celebration became an annual event. At its peak, in the 1880s, it drew more than one hundred thousand to Melbourne’s central streets.Footnote 92

The annual eight-hour day was a creative reshaping of the repertoire of contention, and it served to successfully promote the eight-hours’ cause. It was acknowledged by the press as “the day of all days” for the “artisans of Melbourne,” and a confirmation that the worker might “shed his blood” for the maintenance of the standard.Footnote 93 Participation in the anniversary procession was at first limited to those workers whose trades had won the principle. As a result, the unfolding of the procession served as an incitement to those who had not yet attained the standard; as new unions secured the privilege, so they joined the celebration.Footnote 94 And the claiming of the city’s streets was itself a demonstration of strength. It has been estimated that by the mid-1880s the event encompassed 22 bands, 70 trade societies, and some 140,000 spectators.Footnote 95 Observers suggested that “the streets themselves” were the “most striking portion of the show,”Footnote 96 and that the commemoration was thought to establish that “this is a working man’s country.”Footnote 97

Sydney’s eight-hour campaign provides a contrast. Public meetings were fewer and smaller, and in consequence, the movement did not make so substantial a public impact.

In Sydney, stonemasons initially marked their eight-hour success with a banquet for society members. Carpenters celebrated more publicly from the early 1860s, but this was more a pleasure trip (conventionally a beachside picnic) than a mass demonstration. Its organizers were dubbed a “picnic committee” (not a “demonstration committee,” as in Victoria).Footnote 98 Even in 1874, “A Traveller” wrote to Sydney’s Evening News to insist that “the working men in Victoria do the thing properly,” and to contrast its “grand” procession and “magnificent” banners of the Melbourne celebration with the less impressive local display.Footnote 99 It was only in later years that workers in Sydney and elsewhere began to apply these techniques to promote the local movement.

Mobilizing structures

The emergence of collective action does not merely require a cause, tactics, and strategy. As Mancur Olson famously observed, since social movements deliver collective goods, the danger looms that individuals will rely on others to bear the costs of struggle.Footnote 100 In the late 1970s, sociologists John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald directly confronted this “free rider problem.” They argued that collective action becomes possible due to the “incentives” and “cost-reducing mechanisms or structures” that activists develop to encourage participation. Consequently, they suggested, scholars should grant close attention to the “aggregation of resources” by campaigners. And since “resource aggregation” requires “some minimal form of organization,” they pioneered a close examination of social-movement organizations.Footnote 101

While McCarthy and Zald privileged the role of “formal” organizations,Footnote 102 later generations of researchers have emphasized the importance of informal and interpersonal networks in the organization of action.Footnote 103 Others still have suggested that it might be more appropriate to focus on the practice of “organizing” than the institutional form of an “organization.”Footnote 104

Attention to both formal organization and to the practice of organizing helps to explain the early success of Australia’s eight-hour movement. Melbourne, the spearhead of the campaign, was also distinguished by the strongest efforts to establish structures and networks to aid mobilization.

As Melbourne’s skilled tradesmen took action to win an eight-hour day in 1856, leading campaigners recognized the need to promote the standard across the workforce. Should it prevail in only “a few trades,” they feared, it would be vulnerable to rescission in “some less prosperous time.” A committee of trades’ delegates therefore worked to form an “Eight Hours” Labor League’ dedicated to bringing the eight-hour system “permanently into operation as speedily as possible.” It held further public meetings to promote the arrangement, sponsored an essay competition, and rallied to the cause of tradesmen struggling to win parity with the building trades.Footnote 105

Alongside the Leagues, Victorian workers also formed a more enduring institution to promote their interests. The vision of an eight-hour day encompassed an opportunity for self-education and full citizenship, and this required a dedicated space. A committee of stonemasons argued for a Trades Hall only weeks after the momentous events of 21 April 1856. A wider committee to establish a Trades Hall and Literary Institute was therefore convened in the aftermath of the eight-hour fête in 1857. “Union was strength, and knowledge was power,” observed one of the scheme’s promoters at a public meeting in 1858. Ambitious plans for the Institute’s building envisaged a great hall with a capacity of more than four thousand, rooms for societies and committees, a refreshment room, and an amusement room. The temporary structure raised by April did not quite embody this grand vision, for the wooden building consisted only of a lecture hall and two classrooms. But as the inaugural President proudly announced, this Trades Hall was “the first that had ever been erected.” The institution vindicated workers’ claims that they would employ their recreation in the sober pursuit of knowledge and of the civic good. But it also became a formidable political organization and a purveyor of resources to those yet to win a fair day’s work. It helped organize new unions, provided a space of assembly, and even coordinated industrial boycotts and the provision of strike funds.Footnote 106 It would also become significant in later attempts to form a Labor Party.

In 1868, a further institution was formed to propel the movement: the National Short Hours League. It reflected the now well-established insight that collective organization granted the eight-hour cause greater public notice. It differed from previous institutions in its concern not just to reinforce the industrial rights of skilled tradesmen, but to extend them to unskilled workers. After little more than a year, the League claimed more than one thousand members; its mass meetings in late 1869 and 1870 sometimes attracted as many as one thousand participants.Footnote 107

In late 1869, the League organized a petition to parliament, pressing the matter of the eight-hour day for future government contracts. And in November 1869, a League deputation to the Victorian colonial Ministers responsible for Lands and for Public Works secured a promise that all future government contracts would contain such a clause.Footnote 108 In June, the League agreed to expand its campaign to encompass corporations, municipal and shire councils, roads boards, and public companies.Footnote 109

This politically-focused organization helped to win the Victorian government to a more committed and complete enforcement of the eight-hour day. It thereby generalized the eight-hour standard beyond skilled tradesmen to many unskilled employees, especially the pick-and-shovel workers employed in the construction of colonial railways and other infrastructure. The success of this broader political struggle was widely acknowledged. In 1871, the conservative Argus newspaper wrote, in a widely reproduced article, that the eight-hour system was now a “condition of government contracts” as well as a principle guiding “most of the government establishments in which labor is paid for by the day.”Footnote 110

These successful organizational maneuvers inspired emulation in other colonial centers, as campaigners elsewhere urged workers to “take a glimpse at Victoria” and to follow its “example.”Footnote 111 Colonial centers outside Melbourne eventually created their own Trades Halls to coordinate and support union action: Sydney in 1871, Adelaide in 1884, and Brisbane in 1885. The Victorian Trades Hall’s rules and practices were explicitly used to frame the establishment and routines of equivalent organizations in the other colonies. Victorian legislation was cited by agitators and lawmakers in other colonies. Victorian unionists led efforts to federate with workers in other colonies, and thereby to generalize their victories.Footnote 112 In 1879, an “Intercolonial Trade Union Congress” convened for the first time in Sydney. It emphasized that eight hours should become a “legal day’s work” across the continent, and explicitly cited the Victorian example.Footnote 113

Conclusion: The eight-hour movement as a social movement

The rapid winning of the eight-hour day in Australia is a source of local pride; an eight-hour monument, erected in 1903, adorns a prominent corner of central Melbourne. Nonetheless, the reasons for Australian labor’s path-breaking victories have not been systematically examined. In this article, I have drawn upon the interdisciplinary field of “social-movement studies” in order to deepen understanding of the eight-hour movement and offer a fuller explanation of its precocious success. I hope to have demonstrated the utility of methods drawn from interdisciplinary social-movement studies, and to have encouraged further dialogue and experiment along these lines. The article also uses the methods of intercolonial comparison. I hope to have demonstrated the value of such comparison, and thereby to have inspired more wide-ranging historical studies in the future, that might encompass comparisons across many nations as well as across regions.

References

Notes

1. Michael Huberman and Chris Minns, “The times they are not changing’: Days and hours of work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 44 (2007), 543; M.P. Shanahan and J. Wilson, “Labor market outcomes in settler economies between 1870 and 1919: accounting for differences in labor hours and occupations,” in: Cl. Lloyd, J. Metzer and R. Sutch, eds., Settler Economies in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 354; Michael Huberman, “Working Hours of the World Unite? New International Evidence of Worktime, 1870–1913,” Journal of Economic History 64, no. 4 (December 2004), 977.

2. On the absence of full adherence to the norm: Greg Patmore, Australian Labour History (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1991), 57–8.

3. This included Sidney Webb and Harold Cox, The Eight Hours Day (London: Walter Scott, 1891); John Rae, Eight Hours For Work (London: Macmillan Co, 1894); and Austrian economist Stephan Bauer, “Arbeiterfragen und Lohnpolitik in Australasien,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Fünftes Heft (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1891), 641–706. French syndicalist Émile Pouget favourably cited Australian struggles as a proof of the value of “direct action” in Émile Pouget, “La conquête de la journée de huit heures,” Le Mouvement socialiste 151. no. 15 (1905), in: L’action directe et autres écrits syndicalistes (1903–1910), Textes rassemblés et présents par Miguel Cheuca (Marseille: Agone, 2010), 235–9. Samuel Gompers noted that Australian workers “inaugurated” a successful movement for eight hours from 1856 in: Samuel Gompers, The Eight-Hour Workday: Its Inauguration, Enforcement, and Influences (Washington: American Federation of Labor, 1920?) [1897], 8.

4. “The Eight Hours Movement,” Age, 8 October 1869.

5. “The Eight Hours Demonstrate and Fete” Age, 22 April 1875; R.A. Hadfield and H. De B. Gibbins, A Shorter Working Day (London: Methuen & Co., 1892).

6. Sydney celebrations: “Eight Hour Demonstration,” Evening News, 29 July 1883. Adelaide: “The Eight Hours Anniversary Holiday,” South Australian Register, 4 September 1883. Brisbane: “Eight Hours Movement,” Telegraph (Brisbane), 2 March 1883. Perth: “The Eight-Hours Movement in Perth,” Daily News, 12 June 1886.

7. This is the case with the mapping offered by Huberman and Minns, “The times they are not changing”“, Shanahan and Wilson, “Labor market outcomes,” and Huberman, “Working Hours of the World,” for example.

8. For example, W.E. Murphy, History of the eight hours movement (Melbourne: Spectator Press, 1896); Julie Kimber and Peter Love, eds., The Time of Their Lives: The Eight Hour Day and Working Life (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2007).

9. John Niland, “The Birth of the Movement for an Eight-Hour Working Day in New South Wales,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 14, no. 1 (April 1968), 75–87; Helen Hughes, “The eight hour day and the development of the Labour movement in Victoria in the eighteen-fifties,” Historical Studies: Australian and New Zealand 9, no. 36 (1961), 396–412.

10. E.g., Andrew Seltzer, “Labour, skills and migration,” in: Simon Ville and Glenn Withers, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 188–90; Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 2.

11. E.g., Niland, “The Birth of the Movement,” 85; Hughes, “The Eight Hour Day,” 397.

12. T.A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia, volume 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1918), 721, 723–4, 733–4, 736, 739.

13. On comparatively better conditions: Andrew Seltzer, “Labour, skills and migration,” in: Simon Ville and Glenn Withers, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 188 and Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered, 12.

14. W.E. Murphy, author of the first major historical work on the topic, was himself a leader of key labour-movement bodies in Victoria. See: J. Hagan, “William Emmett Murphy,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, available at: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/murphy-william-emmett-4276 .

15. Niland, “The Birth of the Movement,” 85–6.

16. Michael Quinlan, Margaret Gardner and Peter Akers, “A Failure of Voluntarism: Shop Assistants and the Struggle to Restrict Trading Hours in the Colony of Victoria, 1850-85,” Labour History, no. 88 (May 2005), 165–82.

17. Michael Quinlan, Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1851–1880 (New York and London: Routledge, 2021). On the import of coordinating campaigns, and a suggestion that this has been “[l]argely overlooked” by earlier historians, 66.

18. Alain Touraine, “The Importance of Social Movements,” Social Movement Studies 1, no. 1 (2002), 90–1.

19. See: S.M. Buechler, “New Social Movement Theories,” Sociological Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1995), 441–64.

20. Michel Wieviorka, “After New Social Movements,” Social Movement Studies 4, no. 1 (2005), 1–19.

21. See especially: Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996); Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768–2004 (Boulder and London: Paradigm, 2004).

22. Edward Shorter and Charles Tilly, Strikes in France, 1830–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

23. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-labor-and-working-class-history/most-cited.

24. See, for example: Roberto Franzosi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Kelly, Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, collectivism, and long waves (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Michael Quinlan, The Origins of Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1788–1850 (New York and London: Routledge, 2018) and Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1851–1880 (New York and London: Routledge, 2021).

25. Kelly notes these developments in his: “Rethinking industrial relations revisited,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 39, no. 4 (2018), 701–709; I have updated the citation counts from Google Scholar.

26. As Kelly stresses: Rethinking Industrial Relations, 24.

27. William H. Sewell, “Three temporalities: Toward an eventful sociology,” in: T.J. McDonald, ed., The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 245–78.

28. Katrina Navickas, “What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain,” Social History 36, no. 2 (2011), 197-9 thinks his quantitative approach to collective action could be considered a form of “‘modernization’ thesis”.

29. William H. Sewell, “Collective Violence and Collective Loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution Made a Difference,” Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990), 527–52.

30. E.g., Roger Wells, “The moral economy of the English countryside,” in: Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 2000), 210.

31. Katrina Navickas, “Protest History or the History of Protest?,” History Workshop Journal, 73 (2012), 304, noting that this was a view put by Carl Griffin.

32. Note that though a leading labour historian, Berger also co-edits a book series on the History of Social Movements (with Palgrave Macmillan) and that he has reshaped a German-language journal of labour history: Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, into an English-language journal of social-movement history, Moving the Social. Berger heads the Institut für soziale Bewegungen (ISB) at Ruhr Universität, Bochum, Germany. There are a few others who have sought to link “social movements” and “labour history”; Michael Quinlan’s work, referenced across this article, is another example.

33. Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976).

34. P. Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” American Political Science Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (1973), 169–86.

35. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

36. See: Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

37. Jeff Goodwin, “Are protesters opportunists?,” an unpublished paper discussed in: David S. Meyer, “Protest and Political Opportunities,” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 30 (2004), 132.

38. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 76–7.

39. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 77–80.

40. Wray Vamplew, Australians: Historical Statistics, Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon, 1987, 26.

41. David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 60–3.

42. John Docker, Australian Cultural Elites: Intellectual Traditions in Sydney and Melbourne, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1974, famously contrasted Melbourne and Sydney culture, describing Melbourne’s culture in these terms.

43. “Mr David Moore’s Final Meeting at Astley’s,” Age, 23 September 1856; “The Attorney General in Flinders St,” Age, 11 September 1856.

44. E.g., Victorian Parliamentary Debates, 27 October 1874, 1849.

45. Marian Sawer, “Pacemakers of the World?,” in Marian Sawer, ed., Elections: Full, Free and Fair (Annandale, NSW: The Federation Press, 2001), 1–27.

46. As explored in: Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: the lost work of three Victorian visionaries, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; Sean Scalmer, Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the Making of Australian Politics, Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2020.

47. Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019; William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1902].

48. Henry Parkes, cited in: “Political Crisis in New South Wales,” Bendigo Independent, 17 October 1891.

49. Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1851–1861 (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 1968), 145–6.

50. Scalmer, Democratic Adventurer, Chapter Two and Sean Scalmer, On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain and Australia (Philadelphia, Rome, Tokyo: Temple University Press, 2017), Chapter Four.

51. Scalmer, On the Stump, 120.

52. Sean Scalmer, “Containing contention: a reinterpretation of democratic change and electoral reform in the Australian colonies,” Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 3 (2011): 352–3.

53. Henry Heylyn Hayter, Victorian Year-Book for 1879–80 (Melbourne: John Ferres, Government Printer, 1880), 54; Global historians: Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 31. Rural press supports radical democrats: Scalmer, On the Stump, 113. Age: Scalmer, Democratic Adventurer, 140.

54. John Maxwell, “William Crocker Cornish,” Australian Dictionary of Biography, available at: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cornish-william-crocker-3263 .

55. “National Short-Hours League,” Weekly Times, 30 April 1870; Editorial, Argus, 9 March 1871.

56. “The Employes in Shops Commission,” Ballarat Courier, 4 April 1882. On the radical dominance of membership: Michael Quinlan, “Combating the Tyranny of Flexibility: Shop Assistants and the Struggle to Regulate Closing Hours in the Australian Colony of Victoria, 1880–1900,” Social History 30, no. 3 (2005), 347. Subsequent legislation: Madeleine Johnston, “The Role and Regulation of Child Factory Labour During the Industrial Revolution in Australia, 1873–1885,” International Review of Social History 65 (2020), 455–6. Closing hours and limits: Quinlan, “Combating the Tyranny of Flexibility,” 349.

57. David Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford. 1986. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (1986), 464–481.

58. See, for example: Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment,” Annual review of sociology 26 (2000), 611-639. David Snow, Robert Benford, Holly McCammon, Lyndi Hewitt, and Scott Fitzgerald. “The emergence, development, and future of the framing perspective: 25 + years since ‘frame alignment’” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2014), 23–46; David A. Snow, Rens Vliegenthart, and Pauline Ketelaars, “The framing perspective on social movements: Its conceptual roots and architecture,” The Wiley Blackwell companion to social movements, second edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 392–410.

59. “Shortening the Hours of Labour,” Armidale Express, 19 February 1875.

60. “The Eight Hours Movement,” South Australian Register, 20 April 1863; “A Miner,” “The Eight Hours Question,” Bendigo Advertiser, 30 September 1865; “A Miner,” “Miners’ Working Hours,” Bendigo Advertiser, 21 June 1865.

61. “The Eight Hours Movement,” Cornwall Chronicle (Launceston), 25 June 1864; “Eight Hour Movement,” Bendigo Advertiser, 12 May 1856; “The Trades,” Age, 26 May 1857. On the broader import of anti-slavery discourse, see: Marilyn Lake, “Challenging the “Slave-Driving Employers”: Understanding Victoria’s 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 1 (2014): 87-102.

62. “A daughter of the people,” “Women and the Eight Hours’ System,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 1886; James Service, in: The Second Intercolonial Trades Union Congress: An Official Report of the Debates (Melbourne: Walker May and Co., Printers, 1884), 56; “Short Hours League,” Kyneton Guardian, 23 February 1870.

63. J. Godlee in: “Eight Hours Movement,” South Australian Chronicle, 28 June 1873; Benjamin Douglass, in: “The Eight Hours Movement,” Geelong Advertiser, 28 January 1870; “Public Meeting,” Newcastle Chronicle, 15 November 1862; “Eight Hour’ Question,” Age, 2 July 1856.

64. “Editorial,” Age, 22 April 1884; “The Eight Hours Question,” Age, 17 January 1887.

65. “The Eight Hours Movement,” Star (Ballarat), 23 April 1861; “Public Meeting of the Iron Trade,” Empire, 28 June 1861; Trenwith in: “Trades’ Meetings,” Age, 31 January 1884.

66. “The Eight-Hours Movement,” Queenslander, 27 May 1876; “Short Hours League,” Kyneton Guardian, 23 February 1870; “Long-Fellow,” “The Eight Hours Demonstration Song,” Herald, 20 April 1886; “W.E.,” “Labor – Lord of All,” Labor Call, 6 April 1916.

67. “The Twenty-First of April,” Tocsin, 21 April 1898.

68. “An Assistant,” “Early Closing,” Colonial Times, 28 September 1855; Chas. Lodge, “The Eight Hours’ System,” South Australian Register, 6 March 1863; “Freedom,” Adelaide Observer, 24 May 1873; “Early Closing Movement,” Adelaide Times, 19 September 1854.

69. “Six O’Clock,” “The Early Closing Movement,” Age, 4 March 1856.

70. “The Eight Hours’ Demonstration,” Freeman’s Journal, 10 October 1885; .

71. “Bradnock,” “Eight Hours and Shopkeepers,” Herald (Melbourne), 11 March 1864; “Stonecutter,” “The Eight Hours’ Question,” South Australian Register, 16 April 1863.

72. “The Trades Hall – Demonstration at the Princess Theatre,” Age, 10 June 1858; W. Ellis, “Eight-Hour Movement,” Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January 1875.

73. As noted by: D. Bevington and C. Dixon, “Movement-Related theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism,” Social Movement Studies 4, no. 3 (2005), 185–208.

74. E.g., Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer, Activist Wisdom (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006); B. Doherty and G. Hayes “Tactics and Strategic Action,” in: Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, (Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 269–88; G.M. Maney, (et al), Strategies for Social Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

75. e.g., see: J.M. Jasper, “A Strategic Approach to Collective Action: Looking for Agency in Social-Movement Choices,” Mobilization 9, no. 4 (2004), 1–16; J.M. Jasper, Getting Your Own Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

76. Kerry Taylor, “The Ambiguous Legacy of Samuel Duncan Parnell: The Eight Hour Day in New Zealand,” in: Julie Kimber and Peter Love, eds., The Time of Their Lives, 15–16.

77. Tasmania: “Early Closing Movement,” Colonial Times, 3 October 1855 and “Early Closing on Saturdays,” People’s Advocate, 27 September 1855; “Colonial Intelligence,” Tasmanian Daily News, 7 November 1855; Brisbane: “Moreton Bay,” Sydney Morning Herald, 22 August 1855.

78. Early closing: “Drapers Early Closing Association” and “Grocers Early Closing Association,” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1854. Masons: Murphy, History of the Eight Hours’ Movement,.40–2; “Working Hours Set In Stone,” Sydney Morning Herald, 1 October 2005 and “The Early History of Six Hour Day” Common Cause, 4 October 1958.

79. “The Eight Hours’ Question – Meeting at the Queen’s Theatre,” Age, 27 March 1856; Hughes, “The Eight Hour Day,” 39; “The Early History of Six Hour Day” Common Cause, 4 October 1958.

80. Citation: “October 5, 35 hr week milestone,” Tribune, 16 September 1959. On the lead up, see Helen Hughes, “The Eight Hour Day”.

81. “The Eight Hours Struggle,” Age, 22 April 1856; James Galloway, Letter to the Editor, “Eight Hours’ Labor,” Argus, 22 April 1856.

82. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), 1–2, 7.

83. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964), 6-7, 223, 257, 268.

84. The two outstanding examples of these historical studies are: Tilly, The Contentious French, and Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain.

85. See, for example: William H. Sewell Jr., “Collective violence and collective loyalties in France: Why the French Revolution made a difference.” Politics & Society vol. 18, no. 4 (1990), 527–552; Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 61–2, 198–203; Katrina Navickas, “What Happened to Class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain,” Social History 36, no. 2 (2011), esp., 197–99.

86. Sidney Tarrow, “Charles Tilly and the Practice of Contentious Politics,” Social Movement Studies 7, no. 3 (December 2008), 225 offers a history of the concept and emphasises that it “caught on…widely”.

87. Quinlan, The Origins of Worker Mobilisation and Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation.

88. Quinlan, Origins of Worker Mobilisation, 112, 114, 122.

89. Quinlan, Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation, 60.

90. An inventory of actions, and their frequency and proportional use, is reproduced in: Quinlan, Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation, 45-6.

91. Sean Scalmer, “Remembering the Movement for Eight Hours: Commemoration and Mobilization in Australia,” in: Stefan Berger, Sean Scalmer and Christian Wicke, eds., Remembering Social Movements: Activism and Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 2021), 221. “The Eight Hours’ Question – Meeting at the Queen’s Theatre,” Age, 27 March 1856.

92. Scalmer, “Remembering,” 219.

93. “Eight Hours Day Incidents,” Australasian, 28 April 1888.

94. Minutes (1 April 1859), Minutes Books Eight Hours Anniversary Committee, University of Melbourne Archives, ML MSS 305, Box 5; “Eight Hours Anniversary Celebration,” Age, 5 February 1891; “The Eight Hours Demonstration,” Leader, 25 April 1885.

95. “The Eight Hours Anniversary,” Illustrated Australian News, 30 April 1887.

96. “The Eight-Hours’ Demonstration,” Geelong Advertiser, 22 April 1882.

97. “The Eight Hours’ Anniversary,” Leader, 22 April 1882.

98. “Picnic committee”: Operative Bricklayers’ Trade Society, Sydney Branch Minutes, Noel Butlin Archives, 20 August 1878.

99. “A Traveller,” “Eight Hour Demonstration in Melbourne,” Evening News, 11 May 1874. Shifting dates: e.g., “Annual Eight Hour Demonstration,” Empire, 28 February 1871; “Eight Hours’ Demonstration,” Newcastle Chronicle, 4 March 1871.

100. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

101. John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (May 1977). The quote is from 1216.

102. Their definition of a “social movement organization” was a “complex, or formal, organization”. See McCarthy and Zald, “Resource Mobilization,” 1218.

103. See, for example, Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyoance,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989), 761–75; Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); .

104. This distinction organizes the discussion in Donatella della Porta and Mario Daini, Social Movements: An Introduction (John Wiley and Sons, 2020), Chapter 6: “Organizations and Organising within Social Movements”.

105. “The Eight Hours’ Labor League,” Argus, 26 April 1856; “The Eight Hours Movement,” Argus, 2 July 1856; “The Eight Hours Question,” Argus, 14 August 1856.

106. Helen Hughes, “The Eight Hour Day,” 405–6. “Trades Hall and Literary Institute,” Argus, 6 January 1858; “Melbourne Trades Hall and Literary Institute,” Argus, 15 September 1858; “Eight Hours’ Festival,” Argus, 23 April 1859; “Inauguration of Trades Hall,” Age, 25 May 1859.

107. Benjamin Douglass and William Rice, “The National Short Hours League,” Argus, 29 November 1869; “Eight Hours Meeting at Geelong,” Weekly Times, 29 January 1870; “Eight Hours Meeting at Malmsbury,” Kyneton Observer, 22 February 1870; “The Short Hours League,” Mount Alexander Mail, 5 February 1870.

108. “The Eight Hours System,” Age, 25 November 1869; “The Short Hours League,” Mount Alexander Mail, 5 February 1870.

109. “National Short Hours League,” Leader, 11 June 1870.

110. Editorial, Argus, 9 March 1871.

111. See, for example: South Australia: “Shavings,” “Trades’ Union,” Northern Argus, 6 March 1874; “The Eight Hours’ Demonstration,” Brisbane Courier, 2 March 1867.

112. Victorian rules and practices as model: Queensland – Minutes of Queensland Eight Hours Anniversary Union, Noel Butlin Archives, 15 June 1887, and South Australia: South Australian Trades and Labor Council, Noel Butlin Archives, 5 January 1884. Citing Victorian legislation: Agitator: “A Daughter of the People,” Letter to the Editor: “Women and the Eight Hours System,” Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 1886. “Legislative Assembly,” Brisbane Courier, 20 October 1876. As an impetus to legislation elsewhere: Quinlan, “Combating the Tyranny of Flexibility,” 359. Leading efforts to federate: “The Bakers and the Eight Hours” System,” Argus, 31 March 1884.

113. “Intercolonial Trades Congress at Sydney,” Illawarra Mercury, 10 October 1879.