Kia ora koutou,
So, Comrades, Labour Weekend has come and gone and I spent it doing very little. I thought of the value I place on still being able to work, to play around with words but also the freedom to bake a Sultana cake, lie back and read (‘I don’t want to be hard on your mother, Phoebe dear, but I have to say she is the most grasping, selfish and mercenary creature I have ever met.’ Faro’s Daughter by Georgette Heyer) and in between times I changed the sheets, did the washing, hung it out, looked in my diary to see what I was doing this week, fiddled around on the new computer which I love, deleted three pages, wrote another and much better two pages, picked silver beet to steam, checked my tomato plant called Barry, and all is well. He’s doing fine.
I thought of Sam Parnell, carpenter, who, along with other unionists, led the struggle for the eight hour day, which was achieved in 1840 but Labour Day, the annual day off to celebrate that victory only began in 1890. I wondered, as I do every Labour Day, why it never entered Sam’s head (or anyone else’s it seems) to include women working at home as workers? He, and his comrades, gave no thought whatsoever to the hours women worked at home. Unpaid. Who could not afford help either with their kids or in the house. Women got the vote in 1893 but hours of work didn’t seem to be high on their agenda. True, they were mainly middle class women – working class women were too busy working.. they simply did not have time to go on marches or attend meetings. We can be pretty sure though, that without a cook/housekeeper and someone to wash and iron her clothes, someone who thought she was lucky to get half a day off a week and be paid a pittance, neither Kate Sheppard nor her companions would have been able to lead marches and go to meetings. We can be thankful however, that instead of attending tea parties and chatting about fashion and the dear Queen, they chose to use their free time to march and make a noise about the rights of women to vote. They did not however, raise the subject of the eight hour working day for women who worked as washerwomen, cooks or did housework.
So there are mixed messages about Labour Day. There are still divides. There are still people who work long hours for pitiful wages, others who have Labour Day off and go shopping (and good on them because they guarantee the ones behind the counters keep their jobs), but we can be sure that there are still women working long hours, caring for children or needy others, who do not get a cent for the work they do nor are their hours kept to eight. Yes, I know there is a wage for Carers (and very few of them would do only eight hours) but I also know that there are so many hoops to jump through that a large number of carers just get sick of it and give up.
So the Busk raises its hat to those women and men who work long hours because they have to, or for love, or who work because they get a government subsidy to care for a whanau member, or those who do it because there’s no–one else to do it, all those whose hours of work stretch far past eight hours per day (or night). Without you, some people’s lives would be wretched indeed.
Homai te pakipaki…
Renée
