A Fair Day’s Work: The quest to win back time is a work of history that is both reflective and urgent. It situates the long struggle of the Australian labour movement to secure reductions in the length of the standard working week – from sixty hours a week in the 1850s to thirty-eight hours a week by the early 1980s – within the contemporary fight against the resurgent power of capital, growing economic inequality, and the shrinking of the middle class. As much as it is a historical account of Australia’s leading role in reducing working hours across the world, it is also a call to action for a new generation of working people to rediscover the fight.

Beginning with the Melbourne stonemasons’ strike of 1856, Scalmer’s history travels a chronological course, detailing the strides forward and stumbles backward in the various campaigns for shorter working hours that emerged in state colonies and later were consolidated across a newly federated nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.