Today many around the world celebrate May Day, International Workers’ Day. In New Zealand we don’t commemorate it officially, we have Labour Day in October to serve this purpose.
However, it is always worth pausing on such occasions to reflect on what the lives of working people would be like without the organised labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.
How does a 16 hour work day appeal to you? Maybe the slave wages keeping you from total starvation would be a motivating experience? Perhaps the cramped factory cot or tiny, crowded tenement room crawling with vermin would inspire you?
It is unimaginable for most to imagine that anyone would accept these appalling conditions in modern day New Zealand, yet they were the reality for millions of workers as industrialisation took hold around the globe. Shockingly such conditions still exist in some areas of the world today.
Things are good here though, right? We have the 8 hour day, decent wages and world class state housing thanks largely to the labour movement and sympathetic governments of the day. Well, actually no, not anymore. Not universally anyway.
Modern workers are having to contend with the burden of casualisation, irregular shifts, unpaid overtime, low/stagnant wages, skyrocketing living costs, overpriced/substandard housing and continued gender inequality. I would be surprised if you don’t identify with at least two of these problems.
It is plain to see, then that the struggle is far from over. The need for a workers’ movement is as strong as ever while employers and unsympathetic/hostile governments erode what has already been achieved and seek to take society back into the very dark past where people starve and die from preventable illnesses while working multiple jobs with erratic shifts for pittance wages. This is a society we simply cannot accept.
Together, we will never be defeated but divided we will become slaves. Join a union and become involved with the social justice movement. Be thirsty for humanity!
