BBC Radio 4 2016-05-02

BBC Radio 4 2016-05-02

Good Morning

Many of us today, if we are lucky enough to have a contract of work that gives us the bank holidays, will be hoping for good weather and the chance to relax. If not, like me, you may be setting off for work feeling that you are missing out on an ancient entitlement.

This sense of entitlement may be misplaced, however, for the 1871 Act of Parliament that first introduced Bank Holidays to the UK was not so much motivated by giving workers time off as ensuring that the modernising economy was kept moving by reducing the number of days on which the Bank of England could close from over 30 to just 4 or 5 – May Day not being added until over a century later.

Internationally, though, from the 1880s May Day became associated with workers’ rights through the commemoration of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago during which several people died as part of a campaign to limit working hours to 8 a day. Since then May Day has been marked in London by the Trades Union movement and yesterday saw such a rally again in Trafalgar Square.

The history of our May Day Bank Holiday in the UK, then, enshrines something of the tension between the need for a national economy to be productive if it is to generate the wealth to meet its people’s needs; and the needs of those people for appropriate rest.

The need for a balanced relationship between work and rest is a key theme in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures, expressed most iconically in the notion that even God worked only six days to create the world, and rested on the seventh. ‘Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy’ is the fourth commandment. But the Sabbath is not only intended as a day of rest for those who can afford it, for the commandments make it incumbent upon the leaders of households to feed and shelter their workers and animals no less on this uNPRoductive day than on the other six.

So far this may only seem common sense. Most of us have probably experienced that working all the hours there are affects our concentration, our motivation and eventually our health. Yet, as Jesus reminded those who criticized him for feeding his disciples on the Sabbath: the Sabbath was made for human beings and not the other way around. Human beings are commanded by God to rest not only in order to be fit enough to serve the economy better, but in order to experience our value as beloved creatures whose life is to be enjoyed as unearned gift.

To me these commandments are a caution that economic activity should be at the service of human beings and not be allowed to seduce us into it being an end itself; a reminder that the generation of wealth – while important and necessary - should be at the service of meeting everyone’s needs; and a stimulus to ensure that our patterns of labour allow to everyone the chance to rest and enjoy (perhaps today with the people of Leicester) the gift of the life that is in us.