KEY POINTS:
Here are some facts: we work longer hours than workers in any other OECD country except Iceland - partly because we work more hours every week and partly because we have fewer holidays. A recent Unicef report put us in the bottom quarter of countries for time parents spend with our children.
We have a poor productivity record, meaning we have been very slow to improve our output compared to the hours we work. About 220,000 of us work in shops, and that number is growing. You can shop for more hours of more days than in any other similar country.
The impact of these developments has been enormous for retail workers.
Only 3 per cent of shop workers are unionised. Workers typically earn the minimum wage or only a little more.
Low wages and a lack of working hour regulation (or penalty rates) mean most shop workers work long, irregular or anti-social hours to make a living. They also reduce the incentive for employers to invest in productivity-improving technology or systems.
The combination of a huge workforce and a 24/7 environment that relies on insecure hours to meet employers' fluctuating labour needs contributes to our poor record in spending quality family time together.
Some 64 per cent of employed 16- and 17-year-olds work in shops, as do legions of women with school-age children.
So why, you might ask, would Parliament be considering making things worse?
For the two decades since Parliament allowed shops to open at weekends and through the night, shop workers have at least had three and a half guaranteed days off - days when they could not be pressured to work because almost all shops are closed.
Those days are Christmas Day, Anzac Day morning, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
Tonight MPs are due to exercise a conscience vote on Rotorua MP Steve Chadwick's member's bill making it possible for shops all over New Zealand to open on Easter Sunday. Under the bill, if a local council agreed to Easter Sunday trading then all shops in that council's area would be permitted to open.
Already garden centres, convenience stores and petrol stations can open, but the huge retail businesses, like supermarkets, shopping malls and department stores can't.
The impulse for change isn't all bad. As MP for Rotorua, Steve Chadwick has been spurred by the fact that the legislation we have now does not allow the old exemptions granted to some designated tourist areas to be updated.
Rotorua, with its strong ties to tourism, has complained that this is unfair. Wanaka is another locality that wants at least some shops to be able to open when it runs its hugely popular two-yearly air show.
A legal tidy-up is one thing. Passing what should be a national public interest decision to local councils is quite another. If the problem is inconsistencies over tourist area exemptions then that is the problem we should solve.
Already we have seen at least one metropolitan business association promoting the Chadwick Bill, indicating that shop workers and communities will have to invest heavily to counter attempts to liberalise.
At a time when we are crying out for solutions to long working hours, insufficient family time and community disruption, it seems extraordinary that Parliament might be about to dismantle one of our only laws that explicitly promotes the interests of family and community over the marketplace.
Call me old-fashioned, but I feel different on those three and a half days.
Not because I'm religious. Not because I work in a shop. But because there is peace in the slower pace and the alternative activities we choose for those days.
And an enforced day of keeping our credit cards in our pockets is no bad thing.
Of course for shop workers the stakes are highest. The bill's right for workers to refuse work on Easter Sunday will not fix the problem.
Assuming you know you have such a right, enforcing it takes real courage. Even the stroppiest shop workers tell me how hard it is to refuse to work when you know it will just put more pressure on your workmates - and you can bet your bottom dollar that with shopping a national pastime, Easter Sunday will not be a quiet day at the checkout.
Finally, while workers appreciate the effort of some MPs to reduce the bill's risks by making Easter Sunday pay for shop workers the same as if it were a public holiday (which it currently is not), that will only make a bad move a little easier to live with.
For 20 years we have been busy as a country trading all sorts of protections for cash. How often have we realised that the things we sold have a deeper value than the money we got for them?
* Laila Harre is national secretary of the National Distribution Union.
