The first use of the fair day’s wages/fair day’s work slogan

Reliable hints of the first use of the fair day’s wages/fair day’s work slogan are fairly easy to come by.  Standard compilations of famous quotations routinely attribute the phrase to Thomas Carlyle, who used it in his influential 1842 essay, Past and Present, which sharply criticized the evils of, among other things, laissez faire and the factory system.  Carlyle himself, however, attributed the phrase to the “strong men” of the “poor Manchester Insurrection” (84), a broad-based strike movement that spread throughout the industrialized regions of north England in August 1842, led by what Carlyle described as a “million hungry operative men” (82), whose central demand was “‘a fair day’s-wages for a fair day’s-work’” (84).  But even this was not the first use of the phrase on a national stage.  Three years earlier, Thomas Attwood, the founder of the Birmingham Political Union, which had played such an important role in the popular mobilization of support for the Reform Act of 1832, had also used it when presenting the first Chartist petition to Parliament on Friday, June 14, 1839.  According to Attwood, the petition had been adopted by not less than 500 public meetings in 214 towns and villages across Great Britain, and signed by 1,280,000 people.  “The petitioners,” he told the House of Commons, “state that they only want a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work; and that, if we cannot give them that, then will they … change the representation of this House, with a view to the accomplishment of their wishes” (John Henry Barrow, ed., The Mirror of Parliament. Session of 1839. Vol. IV (London: Longman, Orme, et al., 1839), 2523-6 at 2524).  In other words, while Attwood, like Carlyle, used the phrase, he too credited working class sources, in this case the hundreds of thousands of Chartist petitioners, with originating it.

Frederick Engels was thus not far from the truth when, in a brief overview of the English labor movement entitled "A Fair Day's Wages for a Fair Day's Labor," published in the 1881 inaugural issue of the Labour Standard, a London-based English language socialist newspaper, he credited the labor movement with coining the phrase.  But he wrongly assumed that it was a conventional staple of the movement from the mid-1820s when, after the repeal of the Combination Acts of in 1825, trade unions emerged from the shadows of proscription.  In fact, a computer-aided search of digitized English source materials from the late 1820s through the early 1830s turned up no such phrase. A "fair day's work" did turn up.  But before the mid-1830s, it appeared as often in comments by local overseers of the poor, or more distant managers of Caribbean plantation, concerned that their charges, whether black or white, were not working as hard as they might, than it did in reference to the demands of English wage laborers.  Thanks to the relatively new, computer-aided access to a wide range of source materials from the 19th century (and even earlier), it is also now possible to date its first use fairly easily and confidently to 1834 testimony by Richard Oastler before a Parliamentary committee investigating the conditions of the hand loom weavers, and its subsequent first appearance as a demand of the labor movement proper, in an April 1835 open letter, which appears to have been written by Oastler himself, from what purported to be the “Central Committee of the Hand-Loom Weavers of Bradford” to their local MP, the geologist and reformer, George Poulette Scrope, esq.

Oastler was the proud "steward to Thomas Thornhill, esquire," a wealthy member of the landed gentry, whose estate near Huddersfield (across the Pennine hills northeast of Manchester) he managed and in whose county house, Fixby Hall, he lived, as had his father before him (GDHC, CL, 278).  Like Carlyle, Oastler was a staunch defender of the ways and manners of traditional English society when, as he preferred to imagine it, social obligations could be counted on to trump the competitive opportunities of the cash nexus.  An active anti-slavery campaigner, as had been his father before him, Oastler carried his opposition to chattel slavery and his concern for the condition of African slaves in the Americas over into a similar opposition to the harmful social effects of the new "factory system" and concern for the condition of the working classes in England, especially the youngest and most vulnerable among them.  Hence, after a troubling conversation with his good friend, John Woods, a Yorkshire textile manufacturer worried about the many young children employed long hours in his mills, Oastler penned his famous letter on "Yorkshire slavery," which has been rightly credited with launching the factory reform movement. Moved by the letter, John Cam Hobhouse introduced into Parliament the first of his reform bills setting limits to the hours of work for children; calling on employers to keep "time books," documenting the hours on the job by various classes of employees; and establishing a factory inspectorate to examine these books on a periodic basis to ensure compliance.