EDITORIAL
“If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work,
But when they seldom come, they wished for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents”.
–King Henry IV, Part One
We were recently reminded of the words in this soliloquy by the future King Henry V, when in Part One of Shakespeare’s history, King Henry IV, he resolved to change his thitherto wayward way of life and thereby to “imitate the sun that doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his glory from the world, that when he pleases again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wondered at by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him”.
It was not, however, for the fact of the prince’s resolution that we recalled to mind the passage in the epigraph, but rather for its relevance to the recent public discussion surrounding the coincidence of four public holidays occurring within a period of fewer than a fortnight. Naturally, this phenomenon was viewed by the local employers’ organisation, the Barbados Employers’ Confederation (BEC), as being adverse to the nation’s understandable current preoccupation with productivity and economic growth and its executive director, Mrs. Sheena Mayers-Granville, made a public call for the rationalisation of public holidays in general, citing their “dampening impact upon productivity”.
To be fair, she was also nonetheless quick to recognise the obverse argument that the observance of public holidays also brings opportunities leisure and family time and increased wages for those who are called upon to work on such days.
The response of the Honourable Minister of Labour was to assert that productivity cannot be measured simply by profits and that Barbadians “needed to calm down” when some holidays occur close to one another. He is right. He might also have added that this year’s phenomenon of proximity was owed principally to the fact that Easter with its two working days’ holidays is a moveable feast day and to the quirks of the Gregorian calendar, with April 28, National Heroes’ Day, falling on a Sunday this year, thus forcing the holiday to be observed on the Monday.
This reality is unlikely to recur until 2024, but in that year Easter Sunday will fall on March 31, hence the Easter holidays will be on March 29 and April 1 respectively. Indeed, the identical phenomenon as this year’s should not be repeated until 2030, at earliest.
In fine, the current brouhaha may be considered to be much ado about little. One labour leader has already dubbed the celebration of May 1 as Labour Day to be immutable. Given the origins of this date of observance, we are hard pressed to agree. We are informed by one source that this date was chosen by a pan-national organisation of socialist and communist political parties to commemorate the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago on 4 May 1886 and the 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International called on “all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace.”
That this learning is a sufficient reason for an unchangeable date of May 1 seems scarcely compelling. In fact, regional jurisdictions appear to be of diverse persuasions on the matter, with seven of them (Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, St Vincent & the Grenadines, and Suriname) opting for May 1; four (Antigua & Barbuda, Montserrat, St Kitts-Nevis, and St. Lucia) preferring May 2; while the others choose alternative dates; The Bahamas (June 4); Jamaica (May 23); and Trinidad & Tobago (June 19).