Ira Steward

• Ira Steward
• Born: March 10, 1831
• Died: March 13, 1883

Labor leader and theorist, was born in New London, Connecticut. His formal education was limited to grade school. In 1850, at the age of nineteen, he lost his position as an apprentice machinist with the Draper Machine Company of Providence, Rhode Island, after agitating for a reduction in work hours from twelve to eight per day. He became a prominent advocate of a legally mandated eight-hour workday. In 1863, as a result of his efforts, the International Union of Machinists and Blacksmiths, in its convention at Boston, passed a resolution calling for an eight-hour day to be implemented by legislation. Steward became president of the Boston Eight-Hour League and argued his case in newspaper articles and numerous speeches.

Steward’s doctrine had far-reaching effects on the working-class movement after the Civil War. Eight-hour leagues sprang up in many places, and in 1868 the National Labor Union made the eight-hour day a principal part of its program. Advocates of the eight-hour day often asserted that this would be a just reward for the contributions made by workers to the Civil War effort. They saw their struggle as a continuing attack on injustice in the tradition of the antislavery campaign. By 1870 several cities, five states, and the federal government had adopted eight-hour work days for their employees, though the laws were often circumvented. In time the eight-hour day became a central demand of the trade unions.

Steward regarded the shortening of the work day as the indispensable first step in elevating the status of the worker, and he urged workers to agitate for such legislation. His theory was revolutionary to the extent that it broke with the commonly held view of trade unionists that the most effective way to increase wages is to limit the supply of laborers and to curtail the output of each. Steward had to persuade them that a reduction in hours would not result in a loss of pay. He also had to refute the prevailing view that wages derive from invested capital, that it is the capitalist’s investment that creates the worker’s job and income.

Steward’s theory of economics, one of the first to be developed within the American labor movement, held that the habits, wants, and tastes of workers influence the wages they receive. Workers who toil long hours, he said, seek only wages that enable them to satisfy bodily necessities; such workers are unlikely to rise above their poverty. “How can men be stimulated to demand higher wages,” he asked, “when they have little time or strength to use the advantages which higher wages can buy or procure?” Those who work fewer hours have the time to cultivate tastes and habits that require greater income. By reducing the hours of work, Steward argued, workers would be stimulated to demand higher wages in order to satisfy their new wants and to cultivate their new interests. The increased purchasing power of the worker would stimulate a demand for goods, which in turn would generate greater employment. (This argument was similar to the position of antislavery theorists who held that economic expansion in the South was blocked by the inability of slaves to purchase goods.) As the wages of workers increased and the profits of employers diminished, the entrepreneurial class would eventually wither away and there would emerge a new era of cooperative and harmonious enterprise.

Friedrich Adolf Sorge, Karl Marx’s most fervent disciple in the United States, sent Steward a translation of parts of Das Kapital. Steward agreed with Marx that the wage earner is forced to sell his labor at prices dictated by the employer; but did not agree that this system would perish through a working-class revolution; rather, he expected capitalism to disappear by a gradual process of which the legislated eight-hour day was to be the beginning.

In his struggle for labor reform, Steward was very effectively assisted by his wife, Mary B. Steward, who helped the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics gather information on the status of women and child laborers. She was also the author of a popular couplet: “Whether you work by the piece or work by the day / Decreasing the hours, increases the pay.”

Steward’s writing consisted principally of articles and pamphlets for the labor press, although he intended a large work. Shortly before his death, he gave his notes and an unfinished manuscript to George Gunton, a friend and disciple, who completed the project under the title Wealth and Progress (1887). But, much to the anger of Steward’s friends, the work was more Gunton than Steward.

After the death of Mary Steward in 1878, Steward left his position as inspector at the Boston customhouse—a post he had assumed in the early 1870s—and moved to Piano, Illinois, where he married a cousin, Jane (Steward) Henning, in 1880. He died in Piano at the age of fifty-two, one day before Karl Marx died.

Steward’s pamphlet “A Reduction of Hours an Increase of Wages” and a portion of his unfinished manuscript are found in J. R. Commons, ed., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. 9 (1909; reprinted 1958). Good discussions of Steward’s career and thought are found in D. Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967), J. R. Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States, vol. 2 (1918), and H. Kuritz, “Ira Steward and the Eight-Hour Day,” Science and Society, Spring 1956. A summary of Steward’s views on the reduction of hours is found in D. W. Douglas, “Ira Steward on Consumption and Unemployment,” Journal of Political Economy, August 1932. See also P. S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 1 (1947) and The Dictionary of American Biography (1936).