Monday, September 6, 2010

Labour Day

That was a busy summer for me. I had several projects to work on and also was on short trips around my province and Washington State. So, in a way, it did not feel like much of a summer in a sense we usually perceive that joyful season with its supposedly careless time passing. It is Labour Day now. Kids and college students are going back to school tomorrow. Weather turned to its regular Great Pacific North-West raining (I like it though, no complaints). Summer is over and all business people presumably are back in saddle tomorrow morning.

Celebrating Labour Day for a number of years now I never bothered to inquire what exactly origins of this holiday are. Well, Google, as usually, was quick to shed some light in the issue. What I have read surprised me. First of all Labour Day is a holiday in many countries, all of them related to British Empire in the past even though celebration dates do differ. It is first Monday of September in Canada and USA but say in Jamaica the date is May 23. Origins of that holiday in Canada can be traced to Toronto Typographical Union's strike back in 1872. That's not overly surprising per se but the cause of that evidently memorable strike can be stunning to a regular inhabitant of 21st century: workers were on strike demanding a 58-hour work week.

The source I was reading did not specify how long the work week was for Toronto typographical workers at the time but one can assume it was longer than 58 hours. Regular work week in Canada and many other countries now is 40 hours. People do overtime of course (some are really eager to get it for it is double pay or so usually) and many work part time jobs with anything between 32 and 8 hours. That's kind of incomprehensible to imagine what was it like to work over 58 hours per week as a worker in probably very spartan conditions, low productivity and most likely mentally dulling environment of 19th century Toronto typography.

That made me think a bit about what exactly my work week length looks like. Of course, I do as overwhelming majority of Canadians 40 hours per week plus some extra hours at nights when I work with small businesses of my area. But is it really 40 hours I do what I do for living? I mean, do I really plan, write, debug, deploy, integrate etc code for software all that time? Well, not exactly. Sometimes I can spend long hours thinking about some freakish issue in my code and spend few minutes fixing it when solution somehow emerges.

One of the weird things about it is that once you have your mind focused on the issue, it does not really matter what you do at any given moment. I mean, I can be on my way to washroom, roaming around about office without real purpose or even talk to somebody when suddenly I can see the light in a tunnel so to speak. I wonder what my management or co-workers think of me in those moments. I am not sure they realize I continue staying focused on the problem, almost against my own will. Oftentimes I do think of it when driving home or even while sleeping.

In that regard, my work week definitely not 40 hours but something very different. It can be much shorter or much longer depending on circumstances or some particularly mind bending puzzle I need to solve one way or another. In a way, 40 hours work week is quite ritualistic guideline that has little to do with actual state of affairs.

I read about a 19th century English scientist who visited once a plant of Stanford, a prominent American industrialist. It used to be 60-hours work week there back then in such conditions that the Englishman later wrote that "6 months of working here would justify suicide". I guess back then titles like "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss might have been considered as a cruel joke or downright stupidity.

It is hard to say to whom we should be thankful more for bringing down working hours and improvement of working conditions - Trade Unions or technological revolution. Maybe both. But most likely combination of true democracy and capitalism did the trick as a fundamental prerequisite making, paradoxically, Labour Day free of labor.