On International Workers' Day, which occurs tomorrow, the world commemorates the historic struggle for an eight-hour workday, a critical milestone in the journey towards greater social justice for workers. Here in this part of the world, the Asia-Pacific region has often been a leader in the fight for better working conditions. Indeed, New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to win the aforementioned right in 1840, when carpenter Samuel Parnell successfully negotiated with employers to agree on the principle of "eight hours for work, eight for sleep and the remaining eight for recreation".
The very first International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention, adopted in 1919, limited hours of work to "eight in the day and forty-eight in the week". These rules, however, only applied to workers in "industrial undertakings" on land. It wasn't until 1936 that the first convention to limit working hours on cargo and passenger vessels was adopted. The convention, however, pointedly excluded fishing vessels. The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006, which replaced previous conventions, refined protections for seafarers but continued to exclude fishers. It wasn't until 2007 that the Work in Fishing Convention set the minimum hours of rest for fishers.
