Some Days Should Belong to Everyone

Thirty years ago I worked in a movie theatre. The schedule went up on a clipboard in the back office every Friday for the following week, and I learned very quickly that there were two kinds of yes you could give your manager.

There was the yes you gave when they asked if you could pick up a Saturday night shift. And there was the yes you gave when they asked if you could come in on a holiday, knowing full well that nobody else wanted to work it. Technically both yeses were optional. Practically, if you said no to the second one too often, your hours for the next month would mysteriously dry up, the desirable shifts would go to the kid who kept saying yes, and you would never quite be able to prove it was a reprisal.

Nobody puts that arrangement in writing. Nobody has to. Every retail worker in Canada understands how it works the second they pick up their first shift.

I thought about that clipboard last week when the Ford government changed Ontario's rules to let more retailers open on Victoria Day and Family Day, and a spokesperson for Minister Stephen Crawford told reporters the new rules "will give employees the flexibility to agree to pick up extra shifts at increased pay, while maintaining their right to take the day off."

That is not what flexibility looks like in retail. That is what coercion looks like when you write it in a press release.

A market guy with a caveat

For those not familiar, I am normally a pretty straightforward free-market guy. I favour market-oriented economic policy, a smaller role for government, lower taxes, and the general principle that the state has no business interfering with people's choices, their bodies, or their livelihoods. So a policy that lets more businesses open more days, run by a Premier from my own party, ought to be an easy one for me to support.

It is not. And it took me a minute to figure out why.

The reason is that the "freedom" being expanded here is not really freedom for the worker. It is freedom for the employer to ask a question that the worker is structurally unable to answer honestly. The retail labour market does not work the way the press release pretends it does, and the people writing the press release know it.

How retail actually works

It is remarkable how many people, including I suspect every senior person in the Premier's office, have no idea what happens in retail behind closed doors. Nobody gets fired for refusing to work a holiday shift. They do not have to be. Managers have a hundred quiet ways to make a person's life unworkable. Cut their hours. Schedule them off-peak. Put them on the closing shift the night before their kid's hockey game. Give the good shifts to the people who said yes. You can survive that for a couple of weeks. You cannot survive it for a couple of months, and in a job market this tight, "just go somewhere else" is not the easy out it sounds like.

The kicker is that none of this leaves a paper trail. There is no email saying "I am punishing you for not working Victoria Day." There is just a schedule that gets a little worse and a paycheque that gets a little smaller until you take the hint. Good luck proving causation to the Ministry of Labour.

So when Crawford's office says staff "should not be required to work," what they are really saying is that the legal text of the policy does not require it. The on-the-ground reality of how managers fill a holiday schedule is somebody else's problem.

What is Family Day actually for?

Family Day was first introduced in Alberta in 1990, and is celebrated across several provinces as, in the government's own words, an opportunity for Canadians to reconnect with family while taking a much-needed break from work and school. The clue is in the name. It is a little hard to take that break from work and school when your manager has you scheduled on the floor at Walmart, even if it is for time and a half.

Victoria Day has its own history and its own complications, but the basic point is the same. These are days that were set aside specifically because society decided there is value in everyone being off at the same time. Not just off, but off together. Family Day is not really Family Day if half the family is at work.

"I wanted to go to Home Depot"

The honest justification for this policy is not flexibility or family choice or worker pay. The honest justification is the one Doug Ford himself gave in February: "I wanted to go to Home Depot... it was closed." That is the entire argument. The Premier wanted to shop, and now the law has been bent to accommodate him and the calls he says he was inundated with from "so many people wanting to go to shopping malls."

Do we really need to shop on Victoria Day? Do we really need to be able to walk into Walmart and buy a 75-inch television on Family Day? There are 360-something other days of the year for that. I am not arguing we should return to the pre-1987 days when Ontario shut down for Sunday shopping. That ship has sailed and frankly nobody wants it back. But somewhere between "everything closed on Sunday" and "everything open every day forever" is a small, defensible category of days that the vast majority of working people should get off. Gas stations and pharmacies need to be open, of course. The big-box stores do not.

A small note on hypocrisy

Here is the part that I cannot get past. If the Ford government genuinely believes Ontarians need access to retail on Victoria Day, then why are the government's own offices closed? The Service Ontario locations were dark on Monday. The MPP constituency offices were dark on Monday. Cabinet ministers, by definition, were not at work. The same Premier who decided that you deserve the right to buy patio furniture on Victoria Day did not somehow feel that you deserve the right to renew your driver's licence on Victoria Day.

The message that sends is hard to miss. The political class gets the day off. The retail class gets the option to "flexibly agree" to work it. It is not subtle.

So what can we do about this?

I have a modest proposal, offered in the spirit of testing how committed everyone really is to the principle.

If a retailer wants to be open on a statutory holiday, fine. They can open. On one condition: their corporate staff, from the CEO on down, has to work the full day in the stores. Not phone-it-in remote work. Not "I will pop in for a photo op at noon." A full retail shift. Stock the shelves. Run the registers. Answer the questions. Restock the change room.

Enforcement would be a nightmare and I will not pretend otherwise. But just picture it. Picture every executive on Loblaws Canada's corporate floor losing their Family Day, the same Family Day the floor staff at every Loblaws in the province just lost. Picture every Cabinet Minister who voted for this change pulling a Victoria Day shift at a Home Depot in their riding. Imagine the speed at which "flexibility for our employees" would be redefined the morning after.

If the Premier truly believes this policy is good for the working people of Ontario, he should be working too. So should the people who decided on his behalf that everyone else's holiday was negotiable.

The bottom line

The bottom line is this. I am not asking for a return to forced piety or for the government to dictate when shops can and cannot run. I am asking for a recognition that some days should belong to everyone. That the word "flexibility" should not be used as cover for a power dynamic that every retail worker in this country understands and that the people writing the press releases pretend not to see.

Doug Ford got his Home Depot run. The cost was paid by every retail worker in Ontario who is about to learn, all over again, that their right to take the day off is whatever their manager decides it is.