§ MR. CREMERI beg to ask the First Lord of the Treasury whether, in view of the distress which is generally believed to exist from want of employment, the Government will, at least during the continuance of the distress, reduce the hours of labour in all Establishments and Departments under their control to eight per day?
§ THE FIRST LORD OF THE TREASURY (Mr. W. E. GLADSTONE, Edinburgh, Midlothian)I need not mention to my hon. Friend that the question is not new to the Government, and that serious notice has been taken of it in various Departments. I may refer, in illustration of this statement, to a depu- 490 tation which within the last fortnight waited upon my right hon. Friend the Secretary for War, and received from him a very full statement of his views, and those views were in the direction indicated by the question of my hon. Friend. The different Departments of the Government have a sincere desire and a rather sanguine hope not only of abbreviating the hours of labour, but in all cases where it can be appropriately done, with fair consideration to the interests involved, of reducing them to the standard of eight hours. But my hon. Friend's question is rather a peremptory demand that this shall be done by the Government in all Departments alike and shall be done by them at once. I cannot possibly enter into any engagement to that effect. If my hon. Friend will only consider, in the first place, the enormous extent and importance of the question—the persons employed by the Government are to be counted not merely by tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands— and, moreover, what is still more material, the diversity of what is called labour in the Government Departments is so great that the case does not appear to admit in any rational sense of the application of any one uniform or common rule. There are Government servants who are employed for 24 hours, but then the employment of these servants, although they are labourers—I refer particularly to those in the Customs Department—consists merely of their having to live on board ship and observe in case anything arises which requires their notice. That technically is classed as labour, but practically it is not even intermittent labour. They have nothing to do where the proper rules are observed. Consequently, the matter does not admit of uniform treatment, but the Government will continue to apply itself to the subject in the spirit that I have described. No doubt my hon. Friend's reference to the present distress is so far relevant to the present distress that, where the thing is right of itself, it becomes the more eminently desirable that right should be done without any avoidable delay.
§ MR. CREMERMay I ask whether the hours cannot be temporarily reduced during the continuance of the distress?
§ MR. W. E. GLADSTONENo, Sir. To make these reductions temporarily is 491 a measure that could not be thought of unless with all the arrangements necessary to make it permanent. There are various cases in which temporary reductions by a sweeping measure would simply disorganise the whole labour of a Department.