One of the things you’ll hear, very often, if you talk to a progressive liberal person, is the idea that countries and societies should have priorities that are about more than simply achieving relentless economic growth. Prioritise the environment, they’ll say, ahead of building new roads and factories which consume resources. Put in a minimum wage, even if it raises the cost of doing business. Make sure there are regulations on international trade, so it is ethical and protects workers.
It’s a topic on which the left is mostly right, and mostly in tune with the public. But at the same time, they have always had some exceptions and blind spots where that principle is concerned. Here is one such:
Croatia has announced that the country is moving to ban shopping on Sundays.
The government has stated it wants to “make it possible for retail employees to spend Sundays with their families.”
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) December 3, 2022
Before we get into the issue, a digression: This writer is, as regular readers will know, mostly opposed to Donald Trump. And so it was, way back in 2016, when I happened to be in the United States, that I had the privilege of asking a former Reagan official why it was that he supported a candidate that struck me (and continues to strike me) as entirely unfit for office.
His answer was that he grew up in a working-class household where his father worked, and his mother stayed at home, and that while they had a modest life, it was infinitely better and more comfortable than the lives led by similar families today, where one-income living is simply not sustainable. His view was that the march towards equality and liberalism had, on balance, made things worse for poorer families, while enriching society’s elites. Trump, he thought, might begin to redress that balance.
He was wrong, I think, about Trump, who lacks the discipline to really change anything, but not about the basic problem: People have to work harder and harder just to stand still. Where it was once possible for a one-income blue-collar household to survive, it is increasingly the case that even two-income households where both adults are professionals are struggling.
Sunday trading, I think, might be a small part of the problem. It is sold to the public as being about consumer choice, and freedom. In reality, nobody cheers it more than big corporations who operate shops and pay their employees low wages. Would society survive with only six shopping days per week? Absolutely. Might people benefit from a day where almost everybody has the day off? I think so.
So why did we get rid of it? And why did the left cheer it on, or, at minimum, give it the nod?
The answer is probably as simple as the fact that it’s Sunday, and, in Ireland and many other countries, the fact that it was Sunday was evidence that there was a religious, not a secular, reason for the shops being closed. Consider it the fore-runner of “stop closing pubs on Good Friday” – “Stop closing shops on Sundays”.
But of course, religious practices themselves, from a time when religion was dominant, often evolved for perfectly good secular reasons. The idea of the sabbath being holy, with all work forbidden, might just have been an appealing recruitment tool for Christianity at a time when serfdom and slavery were alive in the world, and there was no such thing as a statutory day off. Telling the bosses that working seven days a week was sinful may just have had a social, as well as religious, appeal. Sometimes, but of course not always, in our rush to toss out religion, we also toss out ideas that may have been good independent of their being religious.
Ireland is actually relatively extreme in having basically no restrictions on Sunday trading: Look around the EU alone, for example, and you’ll find restrictions on it in France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain, and that’s before you get to the generally more conservative countries in Eastern Europe.
It’s also often forgotten that liberalizing Sunday trading was a crusade of Margaret Thatcher’s in Britain, and hugely resisted by the left at the time – yet, when it was introduced here, there was basically not a murmur of opposition.
It’s not something that’s a live issue in Ireland, but perhaps it should be: Retail workers really do deserve a day a week when they’re guaranteed to spend time with their family. I’m not sure the hit to the economy is more important than the standard of living we grant our people.