Labour Day is around the corner for Western Australians – but do people know why we celebrate the holiday?

Labour Day, also known as May Day or Eight Hours Day, was first officially commemorated in 1912 as a celebration of the achievements of the Australian Labour movement. Among them, the successful push for the eight-hour work day we are familiar with today.

Labour Day celebrations are synonymous with unions, with roots spanning back to the 1800s. Workers had no sick or holiday leave, and worked up to 14 hours a day, six days a week. In 1851, Victorian Stonemasons laid down their tools and marched to Parliament house demanding change: eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation and eight hours of rest; later resulting in the eight-hour work day being adopted nationally.

Despite union action being responsible for our current working conditions, union membership rates have been in decline since the 1970s. A report released by the ABS last year shows union membership has dropped across all professions in the last 10 years. The retail trade, accommodation and food service industries are among the lower half of union membership rates – industries with a typically heavy part-time and casual workforce.

So, why is union membership decreasing?

Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre Professor Michael Dockery says demographic shifts and policy have contributed since the adversarial nature of conditions in industrial workplaces in the 1970s and 1980s. 

“The way you negotiated wage increases was basically have a strike. The big change was the Hawke government in the 80’s developed a much more collaborative approach to negotiation and wage indexation… since there’s been a number of changes, we’ve moved to a lot more enterprise bargaining,” he says.

NTEU Curtin branch president Associate Professor Ryan Mead-Hunter suggests there is a modern resistance to union membership.  

“What we’ve seen is a general sort of feeling of apathy towards unions, towards employment in general. The question of what benefit does union membership give to someone is the sort of question we deal with when talking to people about potential membership,” he says.

Professor Dockery says young people in casual or part-time working arrangements aren’t as willing to join unions for jobs they don’t see as long-term careers.

“For many of these young people working these jobs, it’s often while they’re studying, it’s a temporary step. They’re not seeing it as a career, so they don’t have the same motivation to invest in a union and changing the system.”

However, unions remain important for both members and non-members, according to ASU Union member and former Fremantle councillor Sam Wainwright.

“Unions raise the wages and the conditions for those who aren’t members as well. We’re in the same marketplace, so to speak. The strongest help lift the wages and conditions of the weakest,” he says.

Ryan Mead-Hunter agrees.

“I’d argue that unions are absolutely necessary, because, we can’t really rely on anyone but workers themselves to stand up for worker’s rights.”