Labour Day

Labour Day! End of summer holidays! Back to school! For many, Labour Day Weekend is not the most welcome holiday of the year and perhaps tends to create negative associations between life and labour, which is too bad because if you think about it, labour is at the centre of most of our lives. When people ask you what you do, they invariably mean what work you do. Most of us when asked to describe ourselves begin by naming the kind of labour we perform. When we get old and write our memoirs we invariably spend most of our time talking about the things that happened in our line of work. What a shame then, that when we think of labour it is with an inward groan and when we think of the labour movement on Labour Day, we think dark thoughts—if we think of it at all. Perhaps it would be better if we thought of it as the Un-labour Movement because one of the chief accomplishments of the Labour Movement over the years has been to limit the hours of the day and days of the year we spend working so that we can have a life outside work. The eight-hour day, statutory holidays and were some of the longest and hardest-fought achievements of the BC Labour Movement. For more on the proud history of the BC Labour Movement, search Prof. Marl Leir’s excellent EBC article under “Labour Movement.”