We only mark labour one day a year, which is hardly fitting. Work takes nearly as much of our time as sleep, a healthy share of our time from family and friends, and more than the pleasure of recreation. For some, it offers identity, and for others, more starkly the means to make ends meet.
What I learned about labour I learned from my mother, a single parent who worked for 27 years in a cookie and bread factory in Toronto, mostly in an era before decent ventilation and cooling, where a summer shift meant working near ovens and production lines of their products.
She left at 6:30 a.m. and returned around 5, meaning I got myself to school and home, and I don’t recall her in my childhood missing a day, complaining about the conditions, or crumbling under the strain. I admired that endurance then. I am less inclined now to romanticize why it was required.
We would regularly run out of food between her Thursday cheques, and what the dividend of her labour could not yield led me to learn about community, from neighbours making me sandwiches and soup and the occasional dinner so I had one real meal in my stomach before I slept.
I can still feel that hunger pang, and it should not be a surprise that my community work has focused on children, food, literacy and sport. Nor should it be a surprise that, in not knowing the secret of my father’s identity and whereabouts (he lived in West Vancouver, it turns out), I chose an occupation about prying secrets from others. I think all of us with some agency in our work can trace the origins of that passion in our early childhood challenges.
I have had what someone once called a peripatetic career–so many jobs I can barely recount them all. But even when I was hopscotching through organizations, each job used something I knew and forced me to learn something I didn’t.
Most fun: editor-in-chief, The Hamilton Spectator, in a community that rooted for success. Most demanding: founding executive editor, National Post, a project that took all day and night to launch. Most challenging: leading CTV News, there on 9/11. Most rewarding: UBC adjunct journalism professor, where through teaching I can annually renew my love of the craft of journalism.
I have great memories from all of them: Vancouver Sun, BIV, North Shore News, Southam News, CBC Newsworld, The Canadian Press, Billboard, Self-Counsel Press, Roundhouse Radio, the Toronto Star, The Hub. I’ve interviewed heads of state, prime ministers, premiers, mayors, athletes, scientists, businesspeople, musicians, TV stars, public servants, perpetrators and victims, criminals and people who ought to be, and so many more people who just make sense to interview on a given subject on a given day.
The ferocity of my mother’s work ethic and the generosity of my childhood neighbours conferred an appreciation that sent me toward the public purpose of journalism, in which I could repay the community as its surrogate in confronting and understanding its challenges.
Now, of course, I’m seeking a different form of that representation, and in about 40 days I’ll know if I have the community’s confidence.
On this Labour Day, I find myself less inclined simply to celebrate work than to remember the people whose labour sustained us, what it gave them, what it cost them, and how much of who we are was built on their effort.