Labour Day, a unified reminder
Labour Day’s origins are tied to Australian shipping companies but employment issues quickly travelled across the Tasman, resulting an a 10-week strike and an annual holiday, reports Jessica Long.
Wharf labourers in Sydney refused to work New Zealand’s Waihora. A few days later more ships arrived and free labour was brought in to work them. It was the turning point – a general strike was imminent.
Industrial action paralysed the whole trans-Tasman shipping trade for 10 weeks from August 27, 1890.
After the strike ended, Labour Day was celebrated for the first time on October 28 by union members and supporters in New Zealand, as a show of strength in the aims of the movement.
Unionists also celebrated the Maritime Council’s establishment and the 50 years since Samuel Parnell, a carpenter and the council’s founder, won an eighthour work day.
The 1890 strikes all started when a stoker, who was a prominent unionist, was fired. Friction between employer and employee ensued but trouble really began when ship owners refused to affiliate the Officers’ Association with Australia’s Trades and Labor Council in New South Wales and Victoria.
The officers sought the tie-up to distinguish them ‘‘from ordinary servants’’ when they were at sea, but their companies refused to comply with demands.
A strike under the Australian Maritime Union ensued in Australia, filtering down to include some workmen. Ship owners in New Zealand started to worry the tide would drift across the Tasman.
But New Zealand’s Maritime Council, an umbrella organisation of transport and mining unions founded on October 28, 1889, initially wanted to avoid a strike.
However, tensions between Kiwi ship owners and their workers worsened when an attempt was made to bring all organised labour into one big federation.
Wharf labourers in Sydney refused to work New Zealand’s Waihora. A few days later more ships arrived and free labour was brought in to work them. It was the turning point – a general strike was imminent.
Feelings were felt deepest in Wellington and when word arrived that free labour was used, there were ‘‘incipient riots and conflicts’’.
‘‘The feeling of many years found vent in the strike . . . There had been sweating in the factories and retaliatory measures against unreasonable employers, and all the bitterness and uncharitableness came to the surface,’’ the Feilding Star reported.
‘‘The Maritime Council in New Zealand called out all its men from the Union Company’s vessels. The business of the country consequently came to a standstill, and the train services were considerably curtailed.’’
An estimated 4000 unionists stopped work for 10 weeks, which cost the country an estimated £200,000 (about $39,728,607.59, according to the Reserve Bank of New Zealand inflation calculator).
The result ‘‘seriously disturbed industry and embarrassed financial operations’’, the
Marlborough Express reported on November 25, 1913 – when New Zealand was in the throes of yet another series of industrial strikes.
The 1890 strike involved ‘‘a series of violent quarrels between employers and employed’’, and become the first big nationwide labour dispute in New Zealand, according to the New Zealand
History website.
It was drawn out and heated but it all came to an end when industries began to be worked without the strikers. It basically came down to a conference where Sir George McLean, a Union Company representative and Otago MP, ‘‘would listen to nothing but unconditional surrender’’, the
Feilding Star said.
‘‘This the workers’ representatives had to accept, and so the strike ended.’’
Some employers then refused to recognise unions, blacklisted their members, slashed wages and ignored perilous conditions.
The strike was deemed a ‘‘failure’’ and when the Liberal Government took office in 1891, it formed the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. New Zealand then became the first in the world to outlaw strikes and introduce compulsory arbitration as a move to make unions a political ally. The system stuck until 1973.
New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim the right to an eight-hour working day, won by Parnell in 1840, and on October 28, 1890, an elderly Samuel Parnell appeared at the first Labour Day event in Wellington.
Parades were held throughout the country, attracting thousands of supporters who saw the day as a movement to improve conditions for all workers.
Even government employees were given the day off to attend the parades and in 1899 Parliament legislated to make Labour Day a national, public holiday.
The statutory public holiday, on the second Wednesday in October, was celebrated by everyone for the first time in 1900.
After 1910 the marking of Labour Day was moved to the fourth Monday of October.