KEY POINTS:
For many, Labour Day in New Zealand is a day of thanks for those who have fought hard battles for workers' rights down the ages. But it should also make us think about modern unfairness in today's labour market.
The courageous stand by Samuel Parnell, the redoubtable carpenter from Petone, seems unimaginable by today's standards.
In 1840, at a time of no real legal rights or protections for working people, not to mention at a time of great pioneering hardship, Parnell insisted he would work no more than eight hours a day.
"Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep and eight hours for men to do what little things they can for themselves," Parnell famously said.
Parnell was deeply determined and highly principled. But he didn't achieve change on his own. His stand spawned a movement amongst working people which over nearly 60 years steadily saw eight hours become the standard working day, and then led to the first public holiday to mark that win in 1899.
The next step was to make the standard working week one of 40 hours.
A law creating this was introduced by the first Labour Government in 1935. Of course, there will be many today for whom an eight-hour day and a 40-hour week will seem unusual.
Some work well in excess of this, with or without overtime or penal payments. Others regularly struggle to work enough hours over a series of casual or part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.
Injustices such as unreasonable hours of work and lack of decent periods for rest and recreation have crept back into our workplaces and been joined by new injustices, and it is to this situation that unions and working people must now turn their attention.
The growing disparity in incomes between senior managerial ranks and working people are an obvious issue. But they are a symptom of a deeper structural problem.
When a chief executive of a major New Zealand company such as Telecom, with a declining asset base, can be paid a remuneration package of $5 million a year at the same time that many of its skilled workers (represented by my union) are earning less than 1 per cent of that amount and are struggling to get a decent pay rise, we all ought to be justly angered.
New Zealand's developing culture of income disparity need come as no surprise. The directors who sit on the boards of our larger companies and who approve of these outrageous packages for the most part themselves come from the same ranks as those on whom they confer such largesse.
The wealthy and the powerful know how to organise amongst themselves to secure their wealth and privilege.
But the sluggish wage path for those lower down in the food chain in our telecommunications sector is no accident.
* Andrew Little is the national secretary of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union
