Shorter hours and productivity: evidence from bituminous coal

ABSTRACT

At the turn of the twentieth century, advocates for shorter working hours often claimed that workers were so fatigued by the end of the workday, that shortening daily hours from ten to eight would have little effect on output. This study examines the record for U.S. coal mining, analyzing both state-level and mine-level panel data during the transition to the eight-hour day. The hypothesis of zero effect is easily rejected. Instead, output declined almost proportionately with hours, but advancing technology made up for the lost output fairly quickly. There is some evidence that employment increased when the eight-hour day was adopted, as unionists hoped, but the effect is not precisely measured.

KEYWORDS:

• Productivity of working hours
• coal industry
• United mine workers
• eight-hour day movement

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due Turner Cotterman, Peter Orazem, Joshua Rosenbloom and seminar participants at Drake University for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WB0LAK.

Notes

1. Additional experiments claimed to have little effect on output, but were not well-documented (Cahill, 1932, pp. 221–241; Harris, 1972, pp. 68–69; Webb & Cox, 1891, pp. 254–264). Harris (1972, pp. 70–73) describes how all these experiments prompted advocates for the eight-hour day in Great Britain to retreat from their earlier position that shorter hours would lower daily worker productivity and thereby reduce unemployment.

2. See Archbald (1922, p. 63), Goodrich (1925 p. 60), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (1919), and U.S. Coal Commission (1925, p. 1127). One coal operator reckoned, ‘The miner is a sort of a free lance; he goes to work when he pleases and he comes out when he pleases. We are not able to control him, and, as far as my experience goes, he works no less hours now [under an eight-hour day] than he did before. I hold that he never worked much more than 8 hours before, for the reason that he went and came as he pleased’ (U.S. Industrial Commission, 1901, Testimony of George W. Schluederberg, p. 82.). Furthermore, ‘in most instances, bituminous coal operators do not keep a record of the number of hours worked per day by pieceworkers. the only evidence that a pick miner, loader, or cutter worked on a given day is the presence of his check number on the weight sheet.’ (Fisher and Bezanson, 1932, p. 221.)

3. Barzel (1973, p. 228). Note that the output elasticity necessarily equals the ratio of the marginal product to the average product.

4. See Official Report (p. 27). Prior hours of work are listed on pp. 3–4. Section 5 of the new contract appears on p. 27. The contract is also reproduced in Roy (1907, pp. 333–335), Suffern (1926, pp. 447–449), U.S. Geological Survey (1897, p. 338), and twice in Evans (1920, vol. 2, pp. 550–552, 789–791).

5. It is unclear why the Commission ignored 1894.

6. The Commission’s source for the productivity data was the U.S. Geological Survey, but that agency admits its data are from the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics [IBLS] through 1898 (U.S. Geological Survey, 1901, p. 370). The IBLS published data for fiscal years ending June 30. The long strike that resulted in a shorter workday did not begin until July of 1897—that is, the beginning of fiscal 1898 (George, 1898a, p. 186; IBLS, 1897, p. 161).

7. Silvestre (2021) describes a continuous stream of small-scale technological advances in U.S. and European coal mining during this period.

8. Most likely, ‘average days’ were computed as a simple average across mines, unweighted by employment or output (IBLS, 1899, p. L).

9. It is difficult to say whether nonunion coal operators reduced hours to forestall unionism (the so-called ‘threat effect’), to forestall government regulation, or simply to compete in tight labor markets. ‘During the war period the demands of labor and of public opinion throughout the country caused the adoption of the eight-hour day for miners in practically every bituminous coal mine in the United States, and today there are almost no large bituminous coal mines in which the standard working time of miners exceeds eight hours out [of] each twenty-four-hour period.’ (Bituminous Operators Special Committee 1923, p. 152). The United Mine Workers demanded a six-hour day in 1919, but were rebuffed by an arbitration panel appointed by President Wilson (U.S. Bituminous Coal Commission, 1920).

10. Rosenbloom and Sundstrom (1994, pp. 163–164), referring to the period before 1903, describe the movement toward shorter hours as characterized by a ‘ratchet effect.’

11. Year fixed effects also control for government regulation of the coal industry during the First World War.

12. State-specific trends can produce misleading estimates if the treatment has delayed effects (Meer & West, 2016; Wolfers, 2006) but there seems little reason to expect that problem here.

13. The calculations assume the average workday was nine and one-third hours for any workers not on an eight-hour day – see Figure 3.

14. The hypothesis that the elasticity is as low as 0.25, as estimated by Atack et al. (2003, p. 184), can be rejected at five percent except in the last column of Table 3.

15. Note that the elasticity of hourly output with respect to daily hours of work must necessarily equal the elasticity of daily output with respect to daily hours of work, as computed near the bottom of Table 3, minus one.

16. See IBLS (1899, p. XL), U.S. Industrial Commission (1901, pp. 109–110), and Official Report (p. 4).

17. As of 1902, the earliest year reported by Boal (2006), Illinois’s union density was 81.7%, higher than Indiana (70.5%) or Ohio (63.7%), and much higher than Pennsylvania bituminous (21.0%) or Pennsylvania anthracite (23.9%).

18. See IBLS (1897, p. 182; 1898, p. 131; 1899, pp. iii), Roy (1907, p. 340), U.S. Geological Survey (1903, p. 375), and U.S. Industrial Commission (1901, pp. 108, 180, 185).

19. A total of 111 Illinois coal operators are listed in Official Report (1898, pp. 32-34). Some operated multiple coal mines in multiple counties.

20. For the years 1902 to 1905, data on ‘local mines’ were not collected for this study, to reduce data collection costs.

21. See George (1898b, p. 452), IBLS (1897, p. 165), IBLS (1898, p. 55), and U.S. Industrial Commission (1901, vol. 12, p. 104, 108, and 184).

22. The elasticity of annual output with respect to days of operation can be computed as one plus the coefficient of log days, and here ranges from 0.78 to 0.89. Estimates of both the elasticity with respect to days and the elasticity with respect to daily hours are larger in Table 5 than estimates in Atack et al. (2003, pp. 182, Table 2, column 1), 0.57 and 0.25 respectively. The hypothesis that the elasticity of output with respect to daily hours is as low as 0.25 can be rejected here at five percent except in the last column of Table 5.

23. These can be interpreted as reduced forms of a system of labor demand and supply equations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William M. Boal

William M. Boal is Professor of Economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. A labor economist, he has published numerous articles on coal mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.