A History of Labour Day in Canada Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

A History of Labour Day in Canada - Essay Example On a Sunday evening a century ago this weekend, 14,000 francophone workers gathered on Old Montreal to prepare for Labor Day. Instead of shouting through the streets, they quietly converged in Notre Dame Church, where Paul Bruschesi, then Archbishop of Montreal, urged them to shun strikes and show reverence to their employers. That same day, 2,000 Anglophone workers descended on what later became St. Patrick's Basilica, in the core of modern downtown Montreal, to prepare for the next day's parade. They heard the identical don't-rock-the-boat message as clergy instructed them to put their trust in church arbitrators to resolve disputes over pay, hours and conditions of work and other issues. Now two Toronto historians have crafted an illuminating, sometimes offensive retrospective of how Labor Day has been marked across Canada. With anecdotes like those above, York University history professor Craig Heron and Steve Penfold, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toront o, deliver substantial analysis. They show how the Labor movement has evolved since the 1880s, along with Canadian society as a whole. In many parts of the country, "Labor Day would eventually die out completely as a workers' festival, or limp on as a spiritless exercise in commercialized civic boosterism" Strong words, Stirring prose.In significant ways, the authors conclude, Labor Day in Canada "is the story of a holiday that never really belonged to workers" and has been supplanted by such holidays as May Day and International Women's Day. Their tone is not entirely bitter or sardonic, though. Heron and Penfold linger in loving detail over the floats, costumes, banners and placards that once made Labor Day parades a key event on community calendars. And they illustrate their points with superbly evocative photos. Even readers inclined to disagree with their hard-edged assessments will concede that Heron and Penfold have laid invaluable groundwork in an area that to date has been poorly documented. They note that times have changed. Early in the last century, "no Asian workers from British Columbia's fish-packin g plants and sawmills ever got invitations to join the West Coast marchers. "In fact," they add, "Victoria's tailors carried a banner in 1901 blaming the Chinese for their plight." Heron and Penfold were hampered, while researching the book, by the fact that few records of past Labor Days have survived, beyond newspaper accounts of the day. In typically quiche fashion, they note that an 1898 parade float by Winnipeg tailors lambasted the awarding of a city-council contract for firemen's uniforms to a local sweat shop -- an open display of dissent that was "apparently ignored by the mainstream newspapers." They learned of it from a small workers' newspaper. In this painstakingly researched volume they elaborate how Labor Day parades have had splendid moments in our history. Primarily, the parades were a much sought-after festival aimed at eliciting attention to the role and needs of Labor. They became a very rich art form developed jointly by organized workers in Canada. Nevertheless, they were also bitterly disheartening to those who attempted to indulge masses of workers in the celebration. The first Labor Day procession was in Toronto in 1882. At that time one of the demands of Labor was to call for a public enquiry into the status of