KEY POINTS:
Last Tuesday was International Workers' Day. I joined 300 other working-class stalwarts for the traditional May Day march up Auckland's Queen St. May Day has never been as big in New Zealand as it is in the rest of the world. In countries like the Philippines and Venezuela, a million workers can turn out for May 1 marches. In the European capitals, several hundred thousand marched this year. Even in the US, where capitalism is a religion, I stood on a corner in New York once and watched a May Day parade as it passed me for more than five hours.
Yet in New Zealand, where we have a proud working-class history, public celebration doesn't happen. The only national memorial day when we get excited about turning out in any numbers is Anzac Day. It's just not the Kiwi thing to get worked up.
Of course, we are out of sync with the rest of the world with May Day as, for some unknown reason, we celebrate our workers' day on the fourth Monday in October. I assume it has something to do with the weather.
My right-wing mates gloat at the lack of numbers on our May Day marches as a sign of weakness of workers' consciousness. They have a point but I'd like to see how many they'd get to a Bosses' Day march.
New Zealand has always aspired to be an egalitarian society where everyone is given a fair deal. Many of the early immigrants from Britain had been involved in struggles against the establishment and were determined to set up New Zealand as a classless society where advancement was possible by your own effort, not just by birth.
New Zealand led the world in social reform under a liberal government in the late 18th century. We were the first country to give women the vote. Further, unlike other colonial countries at the time, the indigenous population here has always had the right to vote. When Parliament was first established in New Zealand, it was based on property ownership. At the time, the concept of individual ownership for Maori did not exist and a creative way around this problem by the establishment of Maori-only seats allowed all Maori to vote. Even today, half of our Maori population still chooses to exercise its mandate through these seats.
Maori workers were, almost from the start, paid the same for their labour as Pakeha workers. Women had to wait until the 1970s for equal pay, and young people still haven't quite got there yet. But the principle of fair pay has always been strong in our culture. We were the first country to bring in universal pensions and benefits for the unemployed. We were well ahead of our time when we introduced a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state 80 years ago, which has largely remained intact despite the mutterings of right-wing politicians.
Samuel Parnell, the carpenter, forced the government to legislate the eight-hour day for workers over a century ago. It took a protracted workers' strike in mines on the West Coast to win smoko and lunch breaks after that. In the 1940s, freezing workers occupied their meat factories to win a 40-hour week and construction workers in the 1970s walked off the Mangere Bridge and won for workers the right to redundancy pay.
I attended a May Day dinner last Saturday night when Prime Minister Helen Clark spoke. She was quite right when she rattled off a long list of legislative changes favouring workers since a Labour-led government was elected in 1999. Over the past eight years, we have seen the minimum wage rise each year. It March, it rose to $11.25, making it almost $4 more an hour than when Labour came to power. Last month, annual holidays increased to four weeks a year as well. The last time it increased a week was in the mid 1970s, when it jumped from two weeks to three weeks, a change, again, made by a Labour Government.
I thought it was a bit rich when Clark claimed the honours for Laila Harre's introduction for parental leave, as it was Harre that drove the policy.
However, when you're the boss, you have that licence. And, even though I have some reservations about the Working For Families package, I do accept that this has been a significant help to thousands of working-class families. These gains for workers have been widely supported in the community and if Labour wasn't Government they wouldn't have happened.
Even the employers moaning about these changes have been muted. But this is more to do with the fact that they know their profits have been soaring in recent years and their employees' wages have barely kept pace with inflation. They know that real pay rates have declined and at the same time they have managed to cut back penal rates for overtime and weekend work from their workers.
What is not admitted by the Government or employers, is that the increase in housing, transport and food is significantly higher than general inflation and has hit workers the hardest.
On the surface, Labour can be pleased with its contribution to workers. However, it cannot disguise the fact that workers' earnings and shares have fallen significantly under their reign. On May Day, we should take stock of how workers are faring in New Zealand. Admittedly there are more jobs, but they aren't paid enough and, even with Labour's recent legislation, the New Zealand workforce's ability to maintain a decent standard of living isn't great.
