The Eight Hours Plan

"The Eight Hours Plan... acknowledges the histories of labour, capital, and changing urban design... Fraser celebrates Samuel Parnell, the founder of the eight-hour working day and, in her work, links a memorial and ode to him with images of twenty-first century office life: a keyboard and mouse, filing cabinets, and the commuters’ motorway between Wellington and the Hutt Valley. The video was reminder... of a moment when the familiar structure of the contemporary workday (as extolled in the song Fraser displays: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for play, and eight for sleep excel”) was not a given. The idea of limiting the number of hours a person could legally give to an employer, was, in fact, revolutionary, and a hard won right." - Thomasin Sleigh, 2018