Labour Day became a national holiday in New Zealand in 1899. It was to commemorate and celebrate the rise of worker powers and how the earliest Pakeha settlers coming to New Zealand fought to create a fair balance of power between the boss and the worker.
Samuel Duncan Parnell came to New Zealand on the ship Duke of Roxburgh in 1839. He was a carpenter who was deeply impacted by the arguments of the day that people should be allowed 8 hours sleep, 8 hours to live their lives and 8 hours to the boss to work. He refused to join his Union in England because they refused to make an 8 hour working day a priority.
Once in New Zealand, Parnell refused to work for anyone who wouldn’t accept his 8 hour working rule and actively went and met new workers coming off the ships arriving in NZ to tell them of the 8 hour working culture he was trying to create.
The bosses tried to resist and tried to force workers to work later, but it became standard working hours in NZ after workers began simply walking off the job if a boss tried to force longer hours.
Fast forward to the NZ working environment of today and we see that Parnell would weep at how workers have been beaten into neo-feudalism. Many workers are over worked and many others are under worked. Many have a precarious working arrangement and have zero job security while health and safety in this country remains one of the worst in the developed would.
Worker deaths are made the workers fault.
Th pandemic has made this all worse.
The Right wings war on Unions in NZ have successfully crushed most into irrelevance and this has happened while worker rights and safety has gone backwards.
When we ‘celebrated’ Labour Day weekend today, there really wasn’t a hell of a lot to praise, and the same can be said of the modern Union movement.
It’s been 5 years since Helen Kelly died & the CTU still looks rudderless.
Helen would aways say to me, “tell their stories”.
Helen was convinced that if the rest of NZ could see the stories of workers and the terrible work conditions they were forced to endure, then NZers innate goodness would generate empathy and demand change.
Helen fought her entire life for the workers of this country, it was immensely angering that she couldn’t get the cannabis medicine she needed in her final months.
5 years since Helen Kelly died and her passing still hangs like a giant black hole over the entire Union movement.
The Wellington Union Conclave today are more focused on woke policing of language and Identity Politics dogma than class struggle. With PSA domination, middle class virtue signalling trumps Revolution every day of the week.
Chris Trotter highlights the CTUs impotence….
At its high-point, under the late, and sorely missed, Helen Kelly, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions (CTU) liked to present itself as the largest democratic organisation in New Zealand. With upwards of 300,000 affiliated members, that claim was no idle boast. As Kelly proved, the CTU has always possessed the potential to do an enormous amount of good.
So, where has it been? Why hasn’t its current president, Richard Wagstaff, become a household name during the pandemic? Up there with Ashley Bloomfield, Michael Baker, Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles? Where was the tireless advocacy for essential workers: the people who stood at the check-out counters, drove the trucks and operated the warehouses? When supermarket workers came under attack from the stupid and the selfish, why were they defended with more passion by their bosses, than by the CTU?
…Helen Kelly wouldn’t have put up with the glib asthetics of wokedom, there was too much work to be done at the coal front than arguing over pronoun use.
Luckily for the insipid Union movement, the ghost of Helen returns with the Fair Pay Agreement which she wrote and went far further in building worker power via universal Union membership than anything the CTU was offering.
Helen Kelly is still saving the Union movement!
A post growth capitalism in a climate crisis world requires new thinking that the Unions should be leading instead of their tedious promotion of pro noun use.
Universal Basic Income, 4 day working weeks, not for profit community wrap around service employment, Financial Transaction tax to shift tax burden from workers to Corporations and universal Union membership are necessities to cope with the magnitude of change coming.
Come on Union movement, Helen’s Ghost can’t do all the heavy lifting.
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There is no point in working any longer, the neoliberal property right obliteration has taken hope away. Work now gets us nowhere. To ‘get ahead’ we either have to be born rich, emigrate or sell meth.
In addition overwork has morphed into ‘presenteeism’ when the workforce pretends to work long hours but achieves nothing.
That is one of the many reasons NZ productivity is static while other countries everywhere are overtaking us.
Neoliberalism supplied NZ with a way to control labour through immigration ponzi’s but it seems that the joke is on NZ who has tolerated with stupid experiment, as we get more people, but less work done and a whole heap of other social problems to try and overcome to boot.
Possibly because the woke are so keen to prioritise a criminal element or those with poor behaviour and morals, as some sort of virtue signalling? Meanwhile some poor migrant doctor already proven and toiling in rural NZ, is ignored.
Keep going Liquor McMansions, drug & ciggie smugglers, expensive but poorly made infrastructure & Diabetes! We have this!
Lets be honest the unions have greatly assisted in their own demise. Outside of Unite and one or two others they have very much acted in away to advance their own executives political goals rather than that of the actual workers.
Look how quickly Andrew Little turned on the Nurses.
Yes the CTU are missing action alright. During the current COVID pandemic one would expect them to be to the fore with press releases about the do & don’t.
Most of my listening is on RNZ, the union prospective is completely missing, whether it is intentional or not (is) they are never consulted when there are big (or small) announcements are made, all we ever get is business lobbyists about how hard done they are, put their and out for more subsidies & squeal to open up, give us a plan, we need a bubble, we need more cheap immigrant labour.
Checkpoint, The Panel & Morning Report are standouts, the presenters must be lining up jobs with the ZB troll farm when the husband & wife duo’s eventually move on!
Mind you, unions are all about their members, if there is no leadership from the top then most lose interest as a lot of the current workforce would have no idea about the battles that were fought in the past or any of the pragmatic leaders of the FOL.
The late Helen Kelly (RIP) was one of a kind, we don’t see many leaders like her that have the courage of their convictions and are prepared to stand up for them, it has been glaringly obvious that the CTU has abdicated it’s responsibilities to the neoliberal onslaught.
I would add that the destruction of unions has led to workplace bullying of epidemic proportions. This is also hugely damaging.
It was the Employment Contracts Act that destroyed unions and once Humpty Dumpty was broken…
The Employment Relations Act under Helen Clarke and the Fair Pay Agreement system do nothing to restore solidarity. If anything they are a nod to the notion that it can’t be restored so we need workarounds.
The younger generation don’t understand what it was like when we had high unions membership. I have found it is no use talking to many of them about the need for solidarity, probably due to the “Divide and Rule” nature of the current system. It’s 30 years since the ECA was passed under Jim Bolger.
On another note, I was under one union or another for the 18 years before the ECA. I was astounded at some of the reasons for strikes by some of the more militant unions. I daresay this helped to shift public support away from unions. However I would like to see a return to solidarity as the system is still hugely stacked in favour of employers.
The failure to call a general strike when the ECA was implemented was the death nell of the union movement, leadership did not make a stand & defend their members hard won rights, it’s been all down hill ever since.
Agreed my friend
I can’t do empathy like that.
Very timely reminder Martyn. Helen Kelly, not forgotten.
The workers are doing just fine thanks.
Parnell would be amazed and proud at how well the carpenters of today are doing. They can name their price and most become business owners in their own right.
Very narrow
As always Pragman.
Not all unions have been assimilated into wokeborg via the CTU. There are still some in the wild that actually work hard to make a difference for working people.
Withdraw your labour.
Why is it so hard for kiwis to just bloody stop.
STOP! Don’t go back to work.
If the yanks can do it, why not you?
How can you when you’re practically a slave and you have dependents?
You are a wage slave.
So what are you going to do fight? Or wring your hands whilst your dependents become brought and sold slaves?
Let me put this to you, the only fight we have left is to stop and withdraw our labour, because everything else will be met with violence.
Workers did leave bad workplaces, and then the governments allowed hundreds of thousands of temporary work visas per year first under Natz and then under Labeen. All those people also had to live somewhere, drive somewhere and have health care! https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/08/07/must-read-migration-chefs-and-essential-skills/ Now many migrants never left and for whatever reason the unions who used to be against the practise now seem to be more akin to pro immigration lobbyists (easy audience?) with constant propaganda, protests about relaxed work visas and more migrants unemployment benefits, than traditional work unions, who now seem dead and buried. RIP work unions!
And where are these workers now?
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