Matt McCarten: Real meaning of May Day lost in the daily slog

Youth rates were abolished after widespread action by younger workers. Photo / Richard Robinson

Yesterday, May 1, was International Workers Day, initially established to mark the international struggle for the eight-hour day, but now broadly recognising the role of working people in society.

In New Zealand we call it Labour Day and unlike the rest of the world we hold it in October.

We don't have a culture of marking Labour Day, let alone May Day, and like most public holidays we see it as just a long weekend off work.

Most of us vaguely know it is connected with the eight-hour day and a carpenter called Samuel Parnell, one of the many carpenters who led the campaign to work no more than eight hours a day.

On many of the immigrant ships from Britain, trades people vowed that they would build a more egalitarian society than the one they left. That meant working fewer hours.

In 1840 the carpenters in Wellington held a meeting and publicly declared that no carpenter would work more than eight hours a day. Anyone who broke the rule was to be thrown into the harbour.

Parnell's name went down in history when he refused to work more than eight hours a day on a Petone shop he was building.

The campaign spread throughout the country, despite bosses trying to get workers to work the normal 10-hour day.

New Zealand became the first country to officially recognise the eight-hour day and in 1899 we declared a public holiday in recognition of the achievement.

Unfortunately for many workers today, the security of an eight-hour day is a pipe dream.

The legislative attacks by the National Government in 1990s effectively ended workers' rights to the security of an eight-hour day.

A huge part of the workforce has to rely solely on casual and part-time work as their main source of income.

Overtime rates of pay for more than eight hours' work rarely now apply in the private sector.

Many workers are required to work long hours to make ends meet. A number of surveys show that New Zealanders work longer average hours than their counterparts in any other industrial country.

Statistics New Zealand research shows that worker productivity increases each year but their real wages continue to drift downwards.

New Zealanders are polite and stoic and it amazes me, given our country's working-class history, that we put up with it.

Most New Zealanders are completely unaware of it.

Anyone who thinks the benefits they enjoy come from the largesse of the boss or Parliament doesn't know history.

The eight-hour day came about because carpenters led a fight for it. Smoko breaks were won by the miners on the West Coast. The 40-hour week was won by meat workers who occupied their worksites.

Redundancy payments were formalised after the almost decade-long Mangere Bridge strike. Equal pay for women came in after a long campaign by working women. Pay parity for nurses was finally won after an industrial campaign.

Under the last government the minimum wage went up $3 an hour after widespread action by low-paid workers. After young workers and high school students went on strike, lower wage rates for young workers doing the same job as someone older were abolished.

Parliament passed workers' benefits and entitlements into laws. But it wouldn't have happened if workers somewhere hadn't started a campaign for those reforms.

The working class today has never been as large a percentage of our population yet there is very little consciousness about their situation as a class.

I'm sure it suits employers and the Government that May Day passes by unnoticed, otherwise workers might start learning their history and draw the appropriate lessons.

The only lasting solution to problems of long hours, insufficient pay and minimal conditions is for workers to organise their power in their own interests. That's what May Day is really about.