Labour is a noble thing, as long as we work together

Monday will be Labour Day, and so it is fitting that our attention be drawn to the noble army of men and women who rise early to catch street cars and buses, so that they may punch the clock before the deadline, selling their time and strength as the merchant sells his goods and the farmer his grain.

The time once was when the “working people” were at the mercy of time and chance for employment, and that this evil is not yet overcome was the theme, of that great but terrible book,

The Grapes of Wrath, where the Joad family passed before our eyes in all their misery, and yet with that incomparable courage expressed by the mother in the last scene, where she says: “We are the people. We come and go, but we can’t be defeated.”

I do not like to hear anyone try to draw a sharp line between “workers” and “owners,” as the radical speakers used to do in days gone by. Surely it is not wrong for a man to “own” his home or his factory. It is an instinct in us to have our own things — furniture, books, china, pictures.

Indeed, I often think marriages would have a better chance of success if people owned more. Furnished flats do not give that feeling of security that marriage should have. Even a dog has been known to hold two people together, or at least tide them over that brittle moment when they were ready to part forever.

Nor do I like the term “working people,” applied exclusively to those who work for wages. I believe one weak spot in our democratic way of life is the way we draw lines between different kinds of work, counting some higher than others in the social scale. Here is an example:

Lily Smith is a smart young woman, who did housework for a friend of mine, and Lily could do it with a flourish, for she had had a good training from her Swedish mother and knew all about parkerhouse rolls and nine-day pickles. She had good wages, a nice room, time off, and no complaints.

But Lily is engaged to a barber, and the barber told Lily she must find employment in something better than housework for to have “his girl” doing housework would hurt his position. So Lily broke the news to her employer, and there was regret on both sides. Lily got work in a laundry — a monotonous job, which calls for no ingenuity at all, but it has a higher social standing.

Women themselves are to blame for the fact that housework, one of the most interesting and pleasant of all forms of labour, with its modern appliances and diversified activities, stand at the bottom of the list. I am always ashamed when I think of the dull, unimaginative way many women, otherwise intelligent, treat the girls who work in their homes.

A good-looking, athletic Irish girl, who is now a nurse, told me of applying for a position at a home in Edmonton in answer to an advertisement. All was settled and the arrangements made — then said the lady to the maid: “Unfortunately, we have but one bathroom, so I shall expect you to take your weekly bath at the YWCA on your day off.”

“Weekly bath,” exclaimed the black-eyed Susan indignantly, “What do you mean by a weekly bath? I have a bath every day of my life. Don’t you?”

And soon after that, the conference broke down.

I spent a happy day once at Knebworth, Hertfordshire, the home of the Lytton family, and one scene remains fresh in my memory. I had been invited by Lady Constance Lytton to spend the day with her and her mother, who lived in the Dower House on the great estate. In the afternoon, the Dowager countess took me to Knebworth to see the great library and writing room of her famous father-in-law, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and there introduced me to her housekeeper, a woman about her own age.

“This is my Brooks,” she said, “and she is one of my dearest and trusted friends.”

The housekeeper replied, looking at the countess with eyes of love and admiration: “It has been my proud privilege to serve your ladyship.”

There was no condescension, no servility. Just two aging women who had come down the years together expressing their mutual affection.

The war is educating us. We will have more wisdom when it is over. Faced with the life-and-death struggle for liberty, many of our silly affectations have been blown away. Class distinctions are going. There are no classes on a lifeboat. No one is disputing the order of seating there.

It thrills me to read of the Women’s Land Army in Britain, recruits from women in country and city. The farmers were at first suspicious of them (just as the Canadian government was a bit shy of organizing a Women’s Auxiliary Force), but now the farmers ask for them. Their work is described in a government bulletin:

Tractor driving, loading and carting manure, plowing, cutting chaff, chopping timbers for pits, “digging for victory” in private gardens, milking cows, reclaiming unused lands.

They get board and lodging and 10 shillings a week. They work cheerfully and with great determination.

In a democracy, people must work with a good spirit. We do not set spies to watch our people. That good spirit, which makes people loyal and true and honest in our defence. In a little book called You Can Defend America, I read these cryptic sentences:

“Yesterday France built a wall. The Maginot Line. Steel and stone. She felt secure behind it. She put her faith in it. Yet France fell. Why? Something was missing. There was a gap through which an invader came. That gap was not only in the wall. It was in the spirit of the people.”

What about us? Are we building a spirit of loyalty into our people?

Now, on Labour Day, let us ask ourselves what we are doing to dignify labour. Out here in Gordon Head, boys are digging bulbs, and the days are hot and dusty and blistering.

One young man who has a gang of boys working for him takes them for a swim in the sea, in the middle of the day. One of the women sends out iced lemonade and sandwiches at 4 o’clock to her workers.

Little things, you say; hardly worth mentioning. But they lighten labour and they build a spirit of comradeship. Do you remember good old Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol? It is not work that sours people. Work is a blessed thing. But when workers are regarded just as “hands” — cogs in a machine, means to an end, and that end is other people’s profit and pleasure — then the heart of the worker withers and grows black and bitter.

Kipling wrote great poems in his time, so great that they will never be old, for they reveal the timeless working of the human heart. This one is called Together:

“When captain and crew understand each other to the core,

It takes a gale and more than a gale to put their ship ashore,

For the one will do what the other commands, although they are chilled to the bone.

And both together can live through weather that neither could face alone.”

Some of McClung’s columns from the 1930s and 1940s have been collected in a book, The Valiant Nellie McClung: Selected Writings by Canada’s Most Famous Suffragist, by Barbara Smith.