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Sean Scalmer, "A Fair Day's Work: The Quest to Win Back Time" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Australia has a special place in the history of struggle for a Fair Day's Work.
In giving a history of Australian worker struggles over the length of the working day, Sean Scalmer historicises things that might otherwise seem universal and stable, including time, leisure and productivity. Decades before any attempt by Australian timekeepers to standardise time, Scalmer shows that some of the earliest working-class activism in Australia was focused on the nature of time and the meaning of leisure. For what was the movement for the eight hour day, inspired by British activist Robert Owen…
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