GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – Labour Day and the death of the 40 hour working week
Yesterday was Labour Day – the Public Holiday set aside to celebrate the rights of workers and in particular the right to an 8 hour working day.The great irony is that like many New Zealanders I am working today because I’m a contractor and not an employee with rights to holiday pay.
There was a time when all the shops and businesses were closed on Labour Day and parades were held to celebrate the dignity of working people and their battle against exploitation – a day when we trumpeted the 40 hour week, equality of opportunity and the family values that once made us proud to be Kiwis.
So what went wrong? What happened to that New Zealand I grew up in where the weekend really did mark the end of the working week?
Answer – the economics and politics of selfishness.
In 1984 – the Labour Party introduced the economic theory of Neo- liberalism we’ve been living under ever since. A theory that says the state shouldn’t interfere with the financial marketplace, that workers are a “resource” not our friends and neighbours, and the public utilities we all paid for with our taxes could be re-labled as “assets” and sold off to the highest bidder.
An ideology that saw National undermine collective bargaining with the (now defunct) Employment Contracts Act that took us down the path of a low wage economy in which a lot of us are working longer and harder for less.
30 years on Labour now says it wants to practice the politics of kindness.. but they still want to fund it with the economics of selfishness from which the rich benefit at the expense of the many.
So I don’t expect to see a return to the 40 hour week anytime soon.
Damn it.
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
Labour has yet to renounce douglas and the damage done to Kiwis and NZ What is stopping them.
That’s a great summary that needs reading at the Labour Party Annual Conference EVERY Year.( And the National Party Conference)lol.
The New Zealand political system, like nearly every other country’s political system is strictly controlled by a spectrum of carrots and sticks. These range from the soft manipulation of media (aka ‘democracy’) to the hard enforcement of violent regime change.
If we were ever lucky enough to have a party that represented the people of New Zealand you could well expect them to come under heavy media attack, state sponsored slander and a well funded opposition.
If we were brave enough to vote them in we would then find ourselves under heavy international economic attack in the form of capital flight and trade wars.
Next comes an internal coup – to ‘return stability’.
And if we resist all that the final option is ‘operation enduring kiwi freedom’.
The problem is not that nobody knows what needs to be done or that government is incompetent (though they’d love us to believe that). The problem is that they aren’t allowed to do it.