James Griffin: Treat Labour Day with respect

A gang of construction workers in Taranaki in the days when roads were made the hard way. Photo / File, NZ Herald Archive

So Labour Weekend is upon us; the weekend that includes Labour Day, the day upon which all New Zealanders commemorate the victory of the workers in the struggle for the eight-hour working day by, instead, working in the garden for a few hours. But seriously, are we treating Labour Day with the respect and reverence it deserves?

Labour Day is one of the best of our public holidays, mainly because it has yet to be commercialised or ritualised. We don't have to exchange Labour Day gifts or cards, we don't need to purchase and consume vast amounts of chocolate and we don't need to stay up until midnight on Labour Day's eve to celebrate the arrival of a new Labour Day or get up at dawn to remember the labourers who fell for the cause. Nope, for Labour Day it simply arrives, you don't go to work and you can do whatever you damn well like, which is all you can possibly ask for in a public holiday.

Yes, if you want to get historically pedantic about it we should really be spending Labour Day holding mass rallies in support of the working classes. But, to be brutally honest, this is highly unlikely in this day and age (and in this National-voting country) where the biggest mass-rallies of the weekend are likely to be at the garden centres of the nation.

It does seem only proper, however, that at some stage across the weekend that we should all, in our own ways, do some little thing in honour of Samuel Parnell and those who fought for the cause of the eight-hour day so that today we can spend 12 hours a day chained to desks, working our arses off. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but something would be nice.

Labour Weekend, depending on the weather, could be a good weekend to finally sort out the inbox on your email account. This is a task that in a tiny way both: (a) acknowledges the roots of Labour Day by being a dull and repetitive task; and (b) can be a celebration in that you can do it whilst drinking a beer or wine. Also getting rid of all the crap emails that mount up with remarkable rapidity is immensely satisfying.

An even more meaningful way of recognising Labour Day is to do one of those jobs around the house that bring to mind the terrible working conditions of the 1800s and precisely why people like Samuel Parnell were fighting for better working conditions. Cleaning the oven, for example, is a dirty, dingy job that can open our eyes to the misery of labour. In fact, for many of us, being head-first in the oven, scrubbing at the accumulated crud of months of roast dinners is as close as we will ever get to understanding life down a mineshaft.

It can be good, also, to turn Labour Weekend into an educational weekend for all the family. Put your children to work for a day doing the horrible jobs around the house - cleaning the soap scum from the shower stall; removing the dead vegetable matter from the guttering; scrubbing out the recycle bin until it stops smelling like the dregs of 1000 parties. Let them grumble and moan for a few hours and maybe they too will go on strike like Parnell did in 1840 - and in this way maybe they will learn that work isn't all about starting an internet company, selling it to Google and making a billion dollars.

The Labour Day Act of 1899, establishing the fourth Monday in October as a statutory holiday to acknowledge the rights of all humans to work for eight hours a day, sleep for eight hours a day and do whatever they damn well wanted for the other eight hours, is one of the best pieces of legislation ever.

Sure these days getting eight hours' sleep is something we all dream of as we're either working too many hours or none at all and the rest of the time is generally spent running round like mad things trying to get all the other stuff that needs doing done, but that is not the point here. The point is that we have rights and if we choose not to use those rights, then that is also our right.

In 1840, in Wellington, the carpenter Parnell and a meeting of his fellow workmen resolved to work from 8am to 5pm, with an hour off for lunch, and any worker who did not follow suit would be ducked in the harbour.

Maybe in this is the key; the key to truly commemorating this great day: we should all go for a swim. It makes more sense than eating chocolate bunnies to celebrate a crucifixion, right?