The general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union was speaking on the Labour conference fringe just hours after Tony Blair had given the party gathered in Brighton the highlight of its week - the leader's speech.
They were also helped by the relative strength of the labour market: both jobs and hours fell significantly during the recent recession, but not nearly as far as they did in the 1980s.
Indeed a classic demand of the 19th Century labour movement was "Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest".
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America's steel industry boasts average labour productivity of less than four man-hours per ton of steel down from about ten man-hours in 1980.
Limits on working hours, mandatory holidays, and a host of protective laws raise labour costs by about 20%, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations.
Insurance companies operate a system of squeezing the labour rate to repairers, restricting their hours allowed to do the job, and taking unnecessary excess payments off drivers.
Labour MPs and trade unions say zero hours contracts strip workers of their rights and are exploitative.
Most businessmen were at first strongly opposed to the measure, saying that it would put up the cost of labour by 11% to make up for the four hours lost each week, squeeze productivity, prompt lay-offs and spread poverty.
Ally that to the job figures, rather more Scots coming into the labour market, and the measure of the number of hours worked, for which the Scottish figure by this summer was more than 6% down on the middle of 2008, while the UK figure was 1.4% down.
Longest journeys can take 27 hours (Stats from Nov 20 Plan Int'l and World Education Assessment of Child Labour in Nepal) The majority of child labourers are trafficked internally.
His lawyers told the court that staff failed to monitor his heart for more than 12 hours during labour and should have delivered him by emergency Caesarean because he was starved of oxygen.
And he said the last Labour government's decision to allow GPs to opt out of after hours care was "disastrous".
Those first few hours sum up all the problems of doing business in Indonesia: excessive red tape, unproductive labour, bad infrastructure, a lack of respect for the rule of law and a reputation for lax security.
He said British farmers had turned to migrant labour because skilled British workers found they could "work lower numbers of hours for more money" in other industries and students were no longer prepared to do seasonal agricultural work, which could be physically demanding.
The strength of organised labour peaked in Europe in the 1970s, about the time that work hours started falling.
Yes, labour was more expensive but time to market once manufactured was perhaps 48 hours instead of 30 days.
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About 40% of twins fused at the head are stillborn or die during labour and a third die within 24 hours.
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French employers have an equally long catalogue of complaints, including the planned reduction in the work week to 35 hours, which is bound to raise labour costs.
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