May Day! May Day!
May. 1st, 2006 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jawnbcTraditionally the 1st of May is celebrated as Labour/Worker Day. The origins of this day, particularly with respect to its ties to Marxist/Marxian ideologies led the US and Canada to move their Labour Day to September. To some extent this has successfully differentiated between a day that celebrates working and a day that underlines the importance of workers' rights movements.
I think, however, that many who celebrate the former aren't fully cognizant of the incredibly powerful impact workers' rights movements have had on the world. Almost entirely for the better.
In feudal times, a very narrow strata of society owned private property. Most people were tenanted labourers: they worked on the land of their landlord, were charged a value for their residence (often squalid), and eaked out a subsistence living. With the advent of modernity came both the service sector and industrialization. Enterprises small and large required labour and capital. Arguably it was the labour that largely generated the capital. Profitability was substantively driven by keeping costs--labour mostly, and materials somewhat--low. And therefore keeping labourers paid as little as possible.
Common ways to do this included firing without cause (to keep others on their toes), overwork people to illness, injury or death, and to withhold earned wages at will. And these sorts of exploitations--treating workers as objects rather than as people--that led to the worker's rights movements. Make no mistake about it, these were adversarial relationships: initially owners and workers, but eventually the advent of a managerial class meant workers against owners and managers.
Few of us lived in a time when people routinely died working in factories--often in horrific industrial accidents. Or were maimed. When women workers were routinely sexually assaulted in the workplace. When employers hired thugs to beat up or kill those who dared seek fairness in the workplace. Initially trade unionists weren't arguing about the terms of collective agreements: they were arguing about staying well, staying alive, having a chance to raise families in security, economic and social. In many smaller towns, enterprises operated as employer, landlord, shopkeep, and schoolmaster. To lose a job was to lose...everything.
We live in a different world now--at least in Canada and the US. But the battles fought 100 years ago here are being waged today in places like Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. We might have (legitimate) concerns about buying "sweat shop" merchandise; trade unionists in those jurisdictions are happy we do--if we can help them leverage working conditions that in local terms are fair. They want living wages, not Canadian wages. They want to be paid for their work. They want to be able to engage with their peers, their employers and their governments in a discourse about how the benefits of industrialization can be a benefit to society--not a handful of entrepreneurs.
So Happy May Day! And here's a few things we should at the very least acknowledge as legacies of those commie pinko Bolsheviks from the past:
The weekend
Minimum wage
Anti-child-labour laws
Collective agreements
Occupational health and safety standards
Employer-paid benefits
Pensions
Family leave/maternity leave
Lunchtime
Adult basic education/literacy programmes
Human rights codes
All of these came directly from the work of trade unionists. Many others, like public education, are also substantially derived from their work. Rather than take these things for granted I'd like to say thank you to the women and men who fought these battles, so all of us might benefit from the richesse that is modernity.
Because if we don't cherish it, and aren't cognizant of its origins, it's suprisingly easy for it to slip away...
I think, however, that many who celebrate the former aren't fully cognizant of the incredibly powerful impact workers' rights movements have had on the world. Almost entirely for the better.
In feudal times, a very narrow strata of society owned private property. Most people were tenanted labourers: they worked on the land of their landlord, were charged a value for their residence (often squalid), and eaked out a subsistence living. With the advent of modernity came both the service sector and industrialization. Enterprises small and large required labour and capital. Arguably it was the labour that largely generated the capital. Profitability was substantively driven by keeping costs--labour mostly, and materials somewhat--low. And therefore keeping labourers paid as little as possible.
Common ways to do this included firing without cause (to keep others on their toes), overwork people to illness, injury or death, and to withhold earned wages at will. And these sorts of exploitations--treating workers as objects rather than as people--that led to the worker's rights movements. Make no mistake about it, these were adversarial relationships: initially owners and workers, but eventually the advent of a managerial class meant workers against owners and managers.
Few of us lived in a time when people routinely died working in factories--often in horrific industrial accidents. Or were maimed. When women workers were routinely sexually assaulted in the workplace. When employers hired thugs to beat up or kill those who dared seek fairness in the workplace. Initially trade unionists weren't arguing about the terms of collective agreements: they were arguing about staying well, staying alive, having a chance to raise families in security, economic and social. In many smaller towns, enterprises operated as employer, landlord, shopkeep, and schoolmaster. To lose a job was to lose...everything.
We live in a different world now--at least in Canada and the US. But the battles fought 100 years ago here are being waged today in places like Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. We might have (legitimate) concerns about buying "sweat shop" merchandise; trade unionists in those jurisdictions are happy we do--if we can help them leverage working conditions that in local terms are fair. They want living wages, not Canadian wages. They want to be paid for their work. They want to be able to engage with their peers, their employers and their governments in a discourse about how the benefits of industrialization can be a benefit to society--not a handful of entrepreneurs.
So Happy May Day! And here's a few things we should at the very least acknowledge as legacies of those commie pinko Bolsheviks from the past:
The weekend
Minimum wage
Anti-child-labour laws
Collective agreements
Occupational health and safety standards
Employer-paid benefits
Pensions
Family leave/maternity leave
Lunchtime
Adult basic education/literacy programmes
Human rights codes
All of these came directly from the work of trade unionists. Many others, like public education, are also substantially derived from their work. Rather than take these things for granted I'd like to say thank you to the women and men who fought these battles, so all of us might benefit from the richesse that is modernity.
Because if we don't cherish it, and aren't cognizant of its origins, it's suprisingly easy for it to slip away...
no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 11:34 pm (UTC)I like your main posting so much I am going to use it in a tutorial on Labour, if you don't mind that is (credited of course)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-01 11:41 pm (UTC)Really? I'm flattered...proof it for me then, eh? ;)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-02 12:37 am (UTC)Below is the history of the 8 hour day here:
The honour of introducing the eight-hour day in New Zealand is traditionally assigned to Samuel Duncan Parnell. A London carpenter, Parnell, on his arrival at Petone in 1840, insisted on working no longer than eight hours when erecting a store for the merchant George Hunter. In later years other claimants have come forward to the title of founder of the eight-hour system, but Parnell's claim remains the best. The idea of reducing the hours of work was in the air in 1840. It was discussed on the emigrant ships on the voyage out, and was carried into practice on arrival. Carpenters were in the forefront of the movement; a meeting of carpenters outside German Brown's (Barrett's) Hotel, Wellington, in October 1840, is said to have pledged itself “to maintain the eight-hour working day, and that anyone offending should be ducked into the harbour”. In the Otago settlement the sequence of events was similar. A reduction of working hours, which had been agreed to on the emigrant ships, was carried out on arrival. In January 1849 Captain Cargill, the resident agent of the New Zealand Company, made an attempt to revert to “the good old Scotch rule” of working 10 hours a day, but he was unable to overcome the resistance of the working people who found a leader in the painter, Samuel Shaw. Canterbury is said to have enjoyed the eight-hour day from the beginnings of organised European settlement. In Auckland, a Chartist painter, William Griffin, led an agitation among the building trades in 1857, which achieved the adoption of the eight-hour working day on 1 September of that year.
While New Zealand was thus the first country in the world to adopt the eight-hour day, the custom was confined to tradesmen and labourers and lacked legislative sanction. From 1882 onwards, efforts were made to legalise the eight-hour day. Bills were submitted to Parliament and annual demonstrations were held in the main centres. Labour Day, which commemorates the introduction of the eight-hour day, became a public holiday in 1899 (the original date, the second Wednesday in October, was changed in 1910 to the fourth Monday of that month) but the many Eight-hour Bills which were submitted in the 1880s and 1890s failed to gain parliamentary approval. Other enactments, however, have made the eight-hour day all but universal in New Zealand.
by Herbert Otto Roth, B.A., DIP.N.Z.L.S., Deputy Librarian, University of Auckland.