Category: Australia

May Day – Melbourne reflections

There’s an old line from Melbourne’s labour movement that still calls us today:

Eight hours work,
Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep,
Eight bob a day.

The National Museum of Australia documents that this verse was part of a popular slogan: “A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”.

It began here in 1856, when stonemasons walked off the job and insisted that a human life should be divided into thirds: one for labour, one for rest, and one for living. It wasn’t a radical demand so much as a human one, a recognition that dignity begins with each of us and that a society reveals its values in how it treats the people whose work keeps everything standing.

You don’t have to go far in Melbourne to find where the whole eight hour idea took shape. There’s a statue up on the corner of Russell and Victoria Streets, the big 8‑8‑8, that most people breeze past on their way to the pub or the museum. That’s the spot where the stonemasons basically said, “Yeah nah, fourteen hour days can get stuffed,” and walked off the job. Their pitch was simple enough to fit on a pub coaster: eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to sleep, get paid eight bob a day. The point wasn’t the exact amount. It was the principle that a fair day’s work deserved fair pay. And somehow, from that little corner of Melbourne, the idea went everywhere.

There’s a temptation on days like this to talk about labour as if it were only an economic category: hours exchanged for wages, productivity measured. But human beings don’t experience work that way. We feel it in our bodies, in the ache of a long shift, in the quiet pride of doing something well even when nobody is watching. We make it part of our identity almost without noticing: we introduce ourselves by name and then by occupation, as if the job were the second half of who we are. But inequity exists. As George Orwell put it, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The hierarchy shifts with time and industry, but the bias stays the same: some labour is celebrated, but some is quietly dismissed, even when the dismissed work is the work that keeps everything running.

There is a word in Japanese — karoshi — that has no real English equivalent. It means death from overwork. Not burnout but actual death, from working too hard for too long. Japan had to coin the term because the phenomenon became too common to leave unnamed. It tells us something important about what happens when the idea that work defines us goes all the way to its conclusion.

Humanism begins with the recognition that every person’s labour is an expression of their humanity, not a resource to be mined. And while much is being said about AI transforming the future of work, for most of the world, the struggle is still for the basics: safety, rest, fair pay, and the right to a life outside work.

Of course, May Day isn’t just about history. It’s also about the places where the eight hour promise never arrived, or arrived and was quietly taken back. People whose labour stays hidden because that’s convenient: migrant workers without protections, and women providing unpaid care that still doesn’t count as real work. Entire communities where dignity is optional.

Even in this country, the promise was never universal. For much of the 20th century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers were legally required to have their wages paid into government trust accounts that many could never access, and from which money simply disappeared. The eight-hour day was being celebrated in the streets while, out of sight, an entire people’s labour was being taken without even the pretence of fairness. The 8-8-8 monument stands a short walk from where that happened. That proximity matters.

The resistance takes quiet forms. In China, a movement called tang ping — lying flat — has spread among young workers exhausted by the 996 culture: nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week, the schedule that much of the tech industry simply assumed was reasonable. To lie flat is to refuse, to just stop performing for a system that has decided their time is worth very little. In South Korea, the government proposed extending the maximum working week to 69 hours. The backlash was swift enough that the proposal was shelved.

Some work has always been pushed to the margins. Sweatshops still operate in the twenty first century, hidden in supply chains that rely on people being too desperate to refuse the terms. The work that keeps households and whole communities functioning (cleaning, caring, domestic labour) is still maligned in no small part because it has traditionally been seen as women’s work. The stigma lingers even when the labour is essential, and the distinction has nothing to do with effort or skill. It has everything to do with who has historically done the work and who has had the power to define its value.

Then there’s the labour that isn’t paid at all: the volunteer work that keeps communities functioning but never makes it into the national accounts. Unwaged and unrecognised, treated as optional decoration rather than the skeleton that holds things together. Other countries track and value this work. Here it’s still framed as charity rather than labour, which is convenient, because it hides just how much of the structure depends on people giving their time for nothing.

Beyond our own borders, the inequity runs deeper. People in the developing world are often denied the stable, fairly paid work that wealthier nations take for granted. Even when they migrate, their qualifications and experience are dismissed as if knowledge only counts when it is earned in the West. The global economy is built to reward some lives more than others, and most people never chose the side of that equation they were born into.

The Philippines has become one of the world’s largest exporters of nurses and carers: people who leave their own children to raise the children of wealthier families, who tend to the elderly parents of people who can’t afford to do so. The work and care are real, but the arrangement depends on a global hierarchy within which one family’s needs are simply worth more than another’s, and on the willingness of people to carry that cost quietly, across oceans, away from home.

In some parts of the world the abuses are blatant: forced labour, unsafe factories, people trapped by debt or coercion. In others they are disguised as flexibility or the price of staying competitive. Different language, same harm. The body knows the truth long before the policy does.

Other species work too. Ants build, bees organise, beavers shape rivers, primates forage with remarkable coordination — but their labour is only for survival. Humans are the only species that turned work into meaning. We attach identity to it, pride, aspiration, even morality, and we build whole systems around deciding whose time matters. A hive optimises for efficiency, but it cannot ask whether the bees flourish. Human societies can — and are judged by whether they do. The point of a society is not to function like a hive or an economy, but to recognise that a life is more than its output. Rest, connection, creativity, and time that belongs to no one else are not luxuries; they are the conditions under which a human life becomes fully human.

And then there are the stories that remind us it doesn’t have to be problematic. Sidney Myer arrived in Australia as a refugee, fleeing persecution with almost nothing but his skills and determination. He built a business empire from a market stall and became one of the country’s wealthiest men, yet he never forgot what it meant to be poor or to be a stranger in a new land. He treated his workers with respect and compassion, paid them fairly and kept people on during the Depression when other employers were cutting staff to the bone. His philanthropy is well known, but his everyday decency as an employer mattered just as much. It shows that the problem isn’t migration or ambition or difference. The problem is a system that chooses to undervalue some people while elevating others, even though dignity costs far less than exploitation.

Humanism asks us to look at all of this without flinching. To remember that the eight hour day wasn’t a gift from above, it was won by ordinary people who refused to accept that exhaustion was the natural state of things. The question now is the same as it was in 1856: what kind of life, or indeed what kind of world, do we believe people deserve, and what are we willing to do to make that real?

And maybe that’s the point of May Day, not the marches or the slogans, but the reminder that rights are only ever secure when people insist on them. The stonemasons didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t wait for the perfect moment. They simply decided that a human life needed room for more than work and exploitation, and they acted as if that were already true.

We can do the same. In our workplaces, in our communities, in the quiet everyday ways we choose to treat one another. The world we live in is made by human hands, and it can be remade by them too. Not through grand declarations, but through the steady, patient work of insisting that people matter and behaving as if that’s the baseline, not the aspiration.

The ancient Greeks had a word for what the stonemasons were really fighting for: skholē — leisure. Not idleness, but free time used for its highest purpose: philosophy, friendship, civic life, the examined life. It’s where we get the word school, which tells you something about how they valued it. They believed leisure wasn’t the opposite of work, it was the point of work. The stonemasons in 1856 would have understood that instinctively, even without the Greek.

Come back to that corner of Russell and Victoria Streets. The big 8-8-8. Eight hours to work, eight hours to play, eight hours to sleep. What the stonecutters were really asking for was not just a shorter shift, it was the right to be human outside of work. To have a life that didn’t belong to someone else for most of its waking hours. We are still asking, and we are still, slowly, imperfectly, remaking the answer.

©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared. Some editorial/artistic assistance supplied by Claude AI and CoPilot AI.