100 Kiwi Stories of WW1: Union man fought for workers' rights

The grave of union secretary Elijah John (Jack) Carey in Etaples Military Cemetery, France.

18 Labour of war
In 1871, a German giant mobilised the New Zealand left. That year 600 people, inspired by Karl Marx, formed an unemployed workers union and demonstrated. This began 40 years of socialist turbulence.

The Liberal Party established Labour Day as a holiday in 1899, during turbulent years of tram, maritime and miners strikes, featuring plenty of involvement by Irish Catholics including Elijah John Carey, known as Jack. He was described as a punchy, humorous five-foot (1.52m) tall man "smartly moustached and bald by his early 30s".

The Australian-born union secretary helped to mobilise hotel and restaurant workers and criticised the centrist Red Feds faction of the Labour movement.

Carey brought international experience to Wellington in 1904. Hospitality workers at the time could work up to 100 hours a week, typically with no days off. Carey organised the hospitality union so it soon had 800 members. Mostly, Carey was standing up for women.

Constant faction fights led to a socialist unity congress in July 1913. Carey was there. Secretary of the United Labour Party, he'd seen the previous year's Waihi miners strike damage the reputation of the union movement. The new threat came from the Prime Minister William Massey, known as the "Farmers' Friend", who paid farmers to become constables. "Massey's Cossacks" were used to beat strikers into submission, including Frederick Evans, who died following a police beating.

Then World War I broke out, and the United States led the West in the designation of Marxism as a form of subversion or espionage. Conscription was introduced to New Zealand in 1915 after Gallipoli, draining the labour movement.

With Kiwis expected to support the British Empire, it was not an ideal time to be calling for Irish republicanism, the dissolution of empire and communism. While a third of Labour believed the only war worth fighting was a class war, Jack Carey got behind New Zealand's effort.

In December 1915, aged 39, Carey jumped aboard a ship and by September 1916 was serving the 2nd Battalion, Wellington Infantry Regiment in France.

A July 1913 Auckland Star report said Elijah Carey was one of many labour supporters "being some of the greatest names in Biblical history. Is this to be taken as an omen for ultimate success?"

Carey died during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The labour movement went on to secure a 40-hour working week and statutory holidays for workers.

To read the first 17 stories in this series, click here.