For the hundreds of thousands of Melburnians who take part in the festivities of Moomba, for almost 60 years now, this long weekend might be associated with the Moomba Festival-Carnival. Those who know their history though, will find that this Labour Day long weekend is an annual public holiday with different dates across the states and territories of Australia, that aims to celebrate the struggles and the contributions of the working people of this land.
In continental Europe, including Greece, but also elsewhere in the world, the achievements of the labour movement, mostly the struggle for an eight hour working day, are celebrated with a public holiday on May 1st. In Australia though, or in countries such as the USA and Canada, this is not the case.
During the mid to late 1800s, the concept of an eight hour working day did not exist. People were working usually 12 hour shifts for at least six days a week.
Many working Australians in that era, following the example of the carpenters working in the colony of New Zealand (Wellington) in the early 1840s, saw the need for better working conditions and in the 1850s there was a strong push for this.

As history tells us, on April 21, 1856, stonemasons at the University of Melbourne marched to Parliament House to apply political pressure for an eight-hour working day. An agreement with employers for a 48-hour week was eventually reached and a victory march was held on May 12 that year and each year after that. In 1856 the new official working arrangements were recognised in New South Wales, followed by Queensland in 1858 and South Australia in 1873.
This is what we are trying to remember with this Monday’s public holiday in Victoria and in Tasmania.

If we are to use the occasion of Labour Day in order to reflect upon the past, present and future of the working men and women of Australia, it cannot escape our attention what has been happening in the last few years in the great social and political laboratory of the world and of western capitalism, namely the United States of America. The unemployed, the working poor, the part-time employees, the freelancers, the diminishing power of the union movement, they all herald a bleak future for the working people of Australia and of the rest of the world.

Richard Greenwald, an American labour historian, as well as others, are now making the point that we are living at the dawn of the freelance world, as more and more people do not have permanent employment and find themselves working as consultants and contract workers. This work shift, they rightly claim, is as profound as the one brought by the industrial revolution.

It is estimated that in the USA, anywhere between 25 per cent to 30 per cent of Americans, regardless of whether they want it, are part time/freelance employees.

Corporation prosperity through labour flexibility is the name of the game in the leading economy of the western world nowadays.

Books catering to the freelancers/part-timers act as cheerleaders celebrating the freedom, creativity and ultimate success of free-lance work.

At the same time, shared co-work places, so-called ‘third spaces’, such as Starbucks, allow a freelancer to set up shop for a small cost (coffee), while bigger shared offices cater to subfields of freelance work, for example writing and journalism, and operate much like gyms, selling memberships, providing an atmosphere (sometimes coffee, meeting rooms), a temporary office (desk, Wi-Fi, phones and faxes) and a social setting for a freelance worker.

The American economy and culture is transforming and evolving into a society with an atomised world of work, where temporary employment displaces stable jobs that were once the norm. If this is going to be the dominant future trend of work in Australia and the rest of the western world, then we are talking about a fundamental transition in the history of humankind.

Without permanent and meaningful work, without a sense of belonging, without a proper income, with the simultaneous demise of the welfare state and with the increased privatisation of education and health, how can working men and women continue to be able to raise a family or to buy a house? How can they continue to live relatively emancipated lives, with political rights, in cultured and democratic societies?