Labour Day Is Called Labour Day for a Reason

I was at Square One in Mississauga this afternoon with my wife, and before anyone jumps to the obvious conclusion, we did not buy anything. The mall was cover for the actually valuable thing, which was a rare couple of hours to walk around and talk to each other without either of our kids present. Anyone in the current phase of parenting knows exactly how highly that ranks on the scale of restorative activities. We drank a coffee. We looked at some things. We left empty-handed.

The admission does not fully absolve me, and I know it. Every foot through the door of a mall on Labour Day, whether that foot's owner spends money or not, is a data point telling the mall operator that Labour Day is worth being open for. My family contributed exactly that data point this afternoon, and I am writing the following paragraphs in full awareness of the contradiction.

Back in February, I wrote a piece called Some Days Should Belong to Everyone after the Ford government decided that more retailers should be allowed to open on Family Day and Victoria Day. The argument I made then was that any country has a real interest in preserving a small handful of days on which the vast majority of working people are actually off at the same time, because off together is a meaningfully different social experience from off in shifts. Labour Day is the same argument arriving on a different Monday. The province has not made an active policy move on this holiday recently, so this is not a story about a specific bill. It is a story about the underlying erosion continuing to happen anyway, one shopping trip at a time, mine included.

What was Labour Day actually for?

Labour Day in Canada traces back to April 15, 1872, and the specific origin story is worth pulling up if it has slipped from memory since Grade 10 civics. On that day, the Toronto Trades Assembly organized a very large public demonstration in support of workers' rights. The particular proximate cause was that twenty-four leaders of the Toronto Typographical Union had been jailed for striking in support of a nine-hour working day, at a time when the standard shift for many industrial workers ran between twelve and fourteen hours. Trade unions were illegal, and striking was legally treated as a criminal conspiracy to disrupt trade. The demonstration was itself an act of civil disobedience by people whose most explicit demand was that the workday should cap at nine hours instead of half a day and change.

The idea that the day would eventually become a federal statutory holiday, and that the descendants of the same industrial workforce would spend that holiday buying throw pillows at HomeSense, would have been so far outside the imaginative frame of the 1872 marchers that it would probably not have registered as a joke.

What does Labour Day look like now?

Certain categories of retail stay open on Labour Day, and reasonably so. Pharmacies remain open because people run out of medication on holidays and cannot always wait for Tuesday. Gas stations remain open because travellers exist. A limited number of highway-adjacent fast-food outlets have a defensible reason to keep the fryer on for anyone stuck on the 401 at three in the afternoon. Nobody is going to argue in good faith that essential-service workers should be barred from doing their jobs on statutory holidays.

The malls are a completely different category, and this is the part where I depart from the standard Canadian centrist take. I actually think we should go back to something closer to the pre-1987 Ontario in which almost nothing at all was open on Sundays. I know how that sounds. I would have said the same six months ago. Then my family spent part of the summer in Germany, and I got to see what a country actually looks like when it still enforces a genuine collective day of rest.

On Sundays in Köln, essentially everything closes. Shops, malls, most restaurants. The city transforms into a walking city, with families out in the parks and the plazas in a way I have not seen in a Canadian downtown in about twenty years. The beer halls stay open, because Germany is Germany and there are limits, and the beer hall workers who make that happen are frankly saints. The overall effect is not sleepy or restrictive. It is restful in a specific way that no Canadian city I have been in for the last two decades has been restful. It felt like the town had all agreed on something.

According to a CBC list of what was open in the Toronto area today, the Toronto Eaton Centre was open from 11am to 7pm, Toronto Premium Outlets from 9:30am to 7pm, CF Markville from 11am to 6pm, Square One from 11am to 6pm (yes, again, guilty), Upper Canada Mall from 11am to 6pm, Vaughan Mills from 11am to 7pm, and Pacific Mall from 11am to 8pm. Each of those buildings was staffed today by a full complement of retail workers, food-court workers, janitors, and security personnel on a holiday named for the historical fight against the exact working conditions those staff currently live under. The malls are open for straightforward commercial reasons. Each operator has run the math and decided that the incremental revenue from a holiday opening exceeds the incremental cost of stat-pay wages, and every retail tenant inside is contractually obligated to keep the lights on when the mall does.

What are people saying online?

Two categories of comment surface whenever this topic comes up, and each deserves separate treatment.

The first is the honest pro-stat-pay view, captured well in a Saskatoon subreddit thread from a couple of years back in which a commenter said that when they were on shift work they loved stat holidays because it meant extra money and they often worked weekends anyway. This is a real position held by real people, and for a substantial subset of shift workers it is entirely accurate. I felt the same way at seventeen, working retail, where a stat shift meant time-and-a-half on top of a schedule I was already going to be working. There genuinely is a subset of the workforce for whom voluntary stat-pay shifts are a benefit rather than an imposition.

The word doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence is voluntary. As I dug into at length in the Family Day post and will not fully re-litigate here, the retail manager who schedules the shifts is the same manager who decides who gets the good shifts for the following month. Refusing a holiday shift a handful of times in a row tends to correlate, in ways that are almost impossible to prove in an Employment Standards Act complaint, with reduced hours the following November. Anyone who has ever worked retail knows the dynamic. Anyone who has managed retail knows it too and knows that pointing at it out loud is a career-limiting move.

The second category is the one that got me writing this. Someone in a Hamilton subreddit thread last year posted with the extraordinary title "Just open a grocery store on Labour Day," complaining that they had been personally inconvenienced by their inability to buy something they wanted on the holiday. The most upvoted reply is so clean I want to quote it directly rather than paraphrase: Tell me you don't understand Labour Day without telling me you don't understand Labour Day. Your poor planning isn't the problem of others.

That kind of complaint would have been immediately recognizable to the 1872 marchers as the entire thing they were fighting against. The premise of the day is that most people are not at work, which necessarily means that if you cannot buy a specific bag of chips at 2pm on the first Monday of September, you cannot buy a specific bag of chips at 2pm on the first Monday of September. Planning ahead is an option. Doing without something for one afternoon is also an option. Between those two, most cases a reasonable person could actually run into are covered.

What can we actually do about this?

The legislative answer, the one I would actually vote for if a party had the courage to run on it, is to bring back something closer to the pre-1987 regime for a very specific and short list of days. Labour Day. Family Day. Victoria Day. Christmas Day. New Year's Day. Not every Sunday. Not every religious holiday. A handful of specific dates on which the country agrees to look more like a Köln Sunday and less like the day before Boxing Day. Include narrow exceptions for pharmacies, gas stations, essential services, and enough restaurants to keep travellers fed. That is it.

The political will for that legislation does not currently exist in Ontario, and given forty years of retail expansion in the opposite direction, it is not going to appear in the next election cycle. But nothing about the current legal regime forces any of us to individually participate in the erosion. The mall stays open on Labour Day because Labour Day is one of its busier shopping days, which is only true because so many of us have decided that a holiday from our own jobs is a good excuse to walk around inside somebody else's. Every foot through the door is a vote for the mall staying open next year. Every foot that stays home is a vote in the other direction.

Next Labour Day my family is voting the other way. If you were at Square One this afternoon, you might consider joining us. And if you have not been to a European city on a Sunday recently, book the trip. There is a version of what a restful day off actually feels like, and Canada used to have it, and giving it back to ourselves would cost us nothing more than the willingness to stay out of the parking lot for one specific Monday every year.