Labour Day, just passed, is
celebrated in just about every country other than Canada on May 1, variously as
International Workers’ Day or May Day. The latter conflates confusingly into
the more ancient, traditional May Day, originally a Roman festival that
celebrated the beginning of summer and Flora, the goddess of fruits and
flowers.
The idea of a Labour Day, however
it’s called, was to celebrate the advancements made by the labour movement
worldwide. International Workers’ Day originally marked the 1886 Haymarket
Massacre in Chicago when workers threw a bomb at police, who in turn fired into
striking workers — killing who knows how many — supporting the eight-hour
workday proclaimed on May 1, 1886 in the U.S.
But a seven-day workweek it remained;
a workweek of six days was only common after World War I. In Victorian England,
a workweek meant 70 hours, or maybe 84 if you were a shopkeeper.
In our hurried dot-com world, where
holidays and the ensuing frenzy to “take care of everything” before vacation
and after means days off are often more trouble than they’re worth, we can
barely picture what would drive people to strike, let alone lay down their
lives, in support of an eight-hour work day. And while we officially don’t have
to work like our ancestors of Victorian times, it sometimes feels like we must.
Today, most of us just complain and
put up with the pace of the compressed and harried life that resumes after the
first Monday of September, as workers go back to work and kids go back to
school. It makes our Canadian Labour Day more of a bittersweet demarcation, one
involving the last long weekend of summer and a grudging reminder that “labour”
is hovering in the wings, anxious to upstage the sweet, slow days of summer.
I was curious to read in Margaret
Visser’s classic,
The Way We Are
, that
we Canadians have it pretty bad in terms of work/play ratios. By Visser’s
account, the hunter-gather in Peruvian rainforests puts in three to four hours
a day of labour to sustain him/herself. In fourth century Rome, workers were
given 175 days off each year, or about half the time. In today’s France,
employers must give workers no less than six weeks of paid vacation time each
year, this in addition to 11 public holidays, although only one is paid — May
Day.
While the number of minimum paid
holidays varies from province to province, a recent survey by the Canadian
Labour Congress, bless their collective heart, discovered that in the context
of 21 OECD nations, we Canucks definitely get the short end of the vacation
stick. Officially, only 10 statutory holidays and 10 paid vacation days each
year — brother! Or perhaps the exhortation should be, strike!
No wonder we’re all out looking for
“convenience” foods to make the grind less grinding. How we interpret that is
another matter: some simply look to eat out or “grab and run” from a fast food
outlet; others will go to the frozen food section of the grocery store.
Statistics Canada tells us that in
2001, the most recent year they’ve got stats for, the average Canadian spent 30
cents out of every food dollar on eating out, up two cents from the previous
five-year survey, so one might suppose that the ratio has increased further.
Not surprising, single men spent the most on eating out, and families with
children the least.
In terms of convenience foods, the
spending in 2001 for frozen pre-cooked dinners and baked goods accounted for 31
cents of every dollar spent on food at the grocery store, compared with 26
cents in 1996, about the same ratio as dining out.
Those who can afford it sometimes
hire “house cleaners” these days to relieve some of their labour time, but very
few hire a cook, other than those we pay for in restaurants and the like.
A proper Victorian household, by
comparison, would invariably boast a housekeeper, considered second in command
as “the immediate representative of the mistress” in a household teeming with
staff, according to Mrs. Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
, first published in 1859 by one Mrs. Isabella Beeton.
The housekeeper was advised to be
“constantly on the watch to detect any wrong-doing on the part of any of the
domestics” while ensuring that cleanliness, punctuality, order and method were
maintained. Such a directive no doubt accounts for the many mean-spirited,
nosey housekeepers that populate British novels and dramas to this day.
Although, the housekeeper was to have
a knowledge of “the culinary art” Mrs. Beeton noted that “she” — as it
invariably was a “she” — god forbid, “does not generally much interfere in the
department of the cook”. Another iconic stereotype: the temperamental,
territorial cook.
As for stocking the Victorian kitchen
itself, it evokes quite a panorama of the “labour” involved in food
preparation, and a notion of how far we’ve come. A basic list of essentials
goes like this: weigh scales, spice boxes, sugar and biscuit canisters, a tea
kettle, toasting fork, bread grater, pair of brass candlesticks, one teapot and
tray, a bottlejack, six spoons, two candlesticks, one candlebox, six knives and
forks, two sets of skewers, one meat-chopper, one cinder-sifter, one coffee
pot, three block-tin saucepans, five iron saucepans, one ditto (?) and steamer,
one large boiling pot, four iron stewpans, one dripping pan, one dustpan, a
fish and egg slice, two fish kettles, one flour box, three flat irons, two
frying pans, one gridiron, one mustard pot, one salt cellar, one pepper box,
one pair of bellows, three jelly moulds, one plate-basket, one cheese toaster,
a coal shovel and a wood meat screen.
Depending on how you regard
evolution, this either pales in comparison or trumps the two-page list provided
in one of the first cookbooks my mom owned,
The Lily Wallace New American
Cookbook
, first published in 1941. It
insists that the new “streamlined” kitchen, as opposed to the big kitchen,
which is “no longer essential”, should contain, among about 400 other items, a
potato ricer, which we had, an apple corer, which we didn’t, plus a ball
cutter, a lemon borer, a grapefruit knife and an ice pick.
Many of these items, save perhaps the
ice pick if you are plotting a nice domestic murder due to rising stress
levels, have fallen into disuse, thank goodness, sparing us much unwarranted
work.
Ideally, by this time after Labour
Day, you are back into routine, avoiding boring lemons and balling melons,
sorting through your favourite meal-oriented “timesavers” so you can “save” a
little time for yourselves and loved ones to revel in, doing absolutely
nothing.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning
freelance writer who has always hated Labour Day.
