Meaning
An honest, reasonable amount of labour for one working day. Almost always one half of the classic labour formula 'a fair day's wage (or pay) for a fair day's work': the trade-union claim that a full and proper day of honest effort deserves a full and proper day's compensation, with reasonable hours rather than exploitation. Almost always appears as one half of the full formula, paired with either wage or pay; the pay pairing is the commoner American form since Roosevelt's 1937 message. Still a fixed formula in pay disputes, minimum-wage debates and employment law. Regional use: British labour-movement origin; now general English, strong in American and Australian labour usage.
Origin
The formula was the standing watchword of the nineteenth-century labour movement, and the early record credits no individual with it. Friedrich Engels, writing in the first issue of The Labour Standard (7 May 1881), said 'a fair day's wages for a fair day's work' had been 'the motto of the English working-class movement for the last fifty years' - usage reaching back to about the 1830s - and that it had served the unions after the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824. Karl Marx, in a speech of June 1865 to the First International (published 1898 as Value, Price and Profit), dismissed it as 'the conservative motto' and urged 'Abolition of the wages system' in its place. Wikipedia records the phrase as a motto of the American Federation of Labor, and Franklin D. Roosevelt used the pay variant in his message to Congress of 24 May 1937: 'a fair day's pay for a fair day's work'. Popular attributions to Carlyle or to a Kipling poem found no support in the sources checked. The literal day's work is far older - the OED's entry for it reaches back to Old English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a fair day's pay
- a fair day's pay for a fair day's work
- a fair day's wage for a fair day's work
Usage Examples
- The strikers' placards said it plainly: a fair day's work deserves a fair day's pay.
- He never did a fair day's work in his life, yet he collected a full day's wage every Friday.
- The negotiators argued the new rates finally honoured the old promise of a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.