'The campaign to limit labour time and win leisure for the workers is the most significant of the Australian union movement's past achievements and continuing struggles. Every Australian who has ever enjoyed a lazy Saturday afternoon barbecue, a day at the footy or a week down the coast should read this splendid book.'
— Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History at the Australian National University, the President of the Australian Historical Association

★2025 new work by Professor Sean Scalmer, esteemed professor of history at the University of Melbourne and the Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia!
★The work embarks on an immersive journey through the 150-year campaign to truncate the workweek, chronicling the transformation from a grueling 60-hour week to the more manageable 38 hours, and the relentless battle that has shifted from an eight-hour workday to the pioneering four-day workweek.
★ From a historical perspective, the book offers a collective solution for workers to regain their time, analyzes the challenges of insufficient protection against overtime work and the dual burden on women in contemporary times, and reveals the crisis of the imbalance between work and life in contemporary times.
★ The publication of the book is supported by the Coral Thomas Fellowship at the State Library of NSW.

The length of the working day and the challenges of work–life balance are pressing issues for many Australians, as well as lively matters of public controversy. While the winning of the eight-hour day is celebrated as a past industrial achievement, contemporary discussions of working hours often overlook its rich history.

Tracing 150 years of campaigns for rights and for the fair distribution of productivity gains, historian Sean Scalmer shows how these movements successfully reduced the length of the standard working week from 60 to 38 hours per week, and how economic, social and political shifts since the early 1980s have stalled this long-term progress. Today, industrial laws provide inadequate protection for excessive hours, and Australian women increasingly shoulder long hours of paid work with the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. This has produced a social crisis for all Australians, but is yet to inspire adequate political action.

As debate over our working lives intensifies amid ongoing political, economic and technological challenges, Scalmer’s labour of love on the history of work and play affords us a way to understand the past so we can win back our time—collectively.

Sean Scalmer
Sean Scalmer is a professor of history at the University of Melbourne and a fellow of the Academy of Social Science in Australia. He researches the history of social movements and democracy, considering both the national history of Australia and transnational and comparative histories.
Sean Scalmer studied political economy and political science at the University of Sydney, before undertaking a PhD on intellectuals and class in the Australian labour movement. He worked as a research fellow in the Department of Politics, Macquarie University (1998-2004), then as a Lecturer in Sociology (2004-2006) at the same University. He joined the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne in 2007. Sean's major interests are in the histories of social movements, class, and democracy. He is the author of a number of books in these fields, including: Dissent Events (UNSW Press, 2002), Activist Wisdom (with Sarah Maddison) (UNSW Press, 2006), The Little History of Australian Unionism (The Vulgar Press, 2006), Gandhi in the West: The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest (Cambridge University Press, 2011), On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Great Britain and Australia (Temple University Press, 2017), and Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the Making of Australian Politics (Monash University Press, 2020). He has also edited six books. Sean is currently working on two projects. One is a history of the struggle over working time, from the eight-hour day to the four-day week (supported by the Coral Thomas Fellowship at the State Library of NSW). Another is a transnational history of 'direct action' as a form of politics (supported by a grant from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung).
On December 2021, Sean Scalmer has been named as new Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.