“When I tell workers here, in retail stores or coffee shops or anywhere that on Monday, if they’re not working, they’re not going to be paid, they look at me as if I’m crazy,” says Judy Haiven, writer, labour activist, organizer and retired professor from Saint Mary’s University’s Department of Management in the Sobey School of Business. “But when I tell them that 20% of their income this week is going to be taken right off the top, they’re scandalized.”
Haiven is explaining that Thanksgiving Monday in Nova Scotia is not a paid or statutory holiday, as it is in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. She recently wrote about this in her newsletter, Another Ruined Dinner Party. However, many businesses are still required to close, meaning employees can’t work—but they won’t get paid for having the day off.
“This is most unusual,” says Haiven, “because the other provinces and territories give the day off as a statutory holiday, meaning people are paid not to work, and if they must work, they usually get added pay even if they’re not unionized.
“But here and in the other three Atlantic provinces—they don’t.”
Nova Scotia’s Labour Standards Code gives six paid holidays to all workers who qualify: New Year’s Day, Nova Scotia Heritage Day, Good Friday, Canada Day, Labour Day and Christmas Day. (Remembrance Day is governed by its own act and employees may or may not have the day off and receive holiday pay.)
Despite Thanksgiving not being one of these six holidays, many places are closed including schools, offices and workplaces governed by federal labour law, meaning radio stations, banks and Canada Post offices.
In Nova Scotia, Thanksgiving is a designated retail closing day, meaning some businesses, like large grocery stores, malls, and hardware stores, are required to close but aren’t required to give their employees a paid day off.
This is why Haiven calls Thanksgiving a “punishing holiday.” It’s one of three such unpaid retail closing days, including Easter Sunday and Boxing Day.
“If people work[ed] here on Monday, they [didn’t] get a penny more than on a regular work day,” says Haiven. “The only time you may get more is if you’re unionized, which fewer than a third of the working people in the province are.”
But for non-unionized workers, “there’s no obligation for employers to pay employees who must take the day off,” says Haiven.
Plus, businesses on the Labour Standards Code’s list of exceptions aren’t required to close and aren’t required to give employees who work that day holiday pay. This list includes: farm stands, fish stores, gas stations, food, bar and hospitality services, grocery stores and drug stores under a specific size, broadcasting and newspaper publications and transportation services.
What’s more, employees who work at businesses required to close on retail closing days have the right to refuse work if they’re scheduled to stock shelves, for example, on these closing days—by giving advance notice. Employees at businesses excluded from closing are not given the right to refuse work on retail closing days (or Sundays, which was enshrined as a right for workers at stores that aren’t exempt from closing, in 2006).
So, why isn’t Thanksgiving a paid holiday in Nova Scotia? Haiven says there are a few reasons. For starters, Nova Scotia and most of Atlantic Canada are considered low-wage areas.
“We’re the lowest, actually, in terms of minimum wage—we’re lower than New Brunswick,” says Haiven. “I never thought I’d say our minimum wage pay is lower than Prince Edward Island, but our pay is lower than any of the four [Atlantic] provinces.
“I hate to tell people this, but minimum wage is extremely important—and if it’s low, it depresses other wages.”
Haiven says Atlantic Canada has a low-wage economy, especially in Nova Scotia, where around 30% of workers are unionized. “This is in the middle of the pack in Canada, but it’s not great.”
Haiven points to the deindustrialization of the province and the collapse of the cod fishing industry 30 years ago as factors leading to the hospitality industry becoming one of the top industries in Nova Scotia—“and we know those jobs are typically not unionized, at a rate of 5%, and that the pay is very low, seasonal and part-time.”
Haiven says this leads to many workers in Nova Scotia not feeling confident enough to ask their employers if they have holidays off or will be paid to stay home.
Haiven researches labour relations and labour unions and is a co-founder and board member of Equity Watch, a non-profit that “fights against harassment and bullying and discrimination in the workplace,” says Haiven.
She’s studied the effects of punishing holidays on non-unionized workers. “Most people don’t have the nerve to ask their employer—they say things to me like, ‘If I have the day off, they’ll tell me at the end of the day,’ or, ‘if I’m getting paid, they’re going to tell me.’
“There is no idea of ‘I’m going to ask, I’m going to be proactive,’” says Haiven, “and that’s what’s sewn into the workers in this province, to be frank, because they’ve had so few rights and there’s so much poverty.”
This is a problem around Christmas, too, says Haiven. “I make the rounds at the bars and restaurants then and no one understands Boxing Day is not a holiday.”
Haiven says that in Nova Scotia, most provincial governments have been “too timid and too out of it in terms of employment law” to change labour standards to make retail closing days, like Thanksgiving and Boxing Day, into general paid holidays for all workers.
“The only way you get a change in that is if there’s political will,” says Haiven, “or if the unions or all the shop workers decide they’re going to fight—but you have to remember that for unions, most of them don’t see this as a big issue, because almost all of their members do get the day off.”
Groups like Equity Watch and the Halifax Workers’ Action Centre fight for all workers; however, despite many people being outraged over punishing holidays and wanting something to change, Haiven says most people think that if we could increase the minimum wage, we’d be doing much better.
“A holiday doesn’t mean as much overall as increasing the minimum wage would—it’s absolutely key.”
In Nova Scotia, the minimum wage is $15.20 an hour—one of the lowest in the country. “Now, there are a couple of provinces which are slightly lower,” says Haiven, “but when you have a very low minimum wage in Alberta, for example—where the minimum wage is $15 an hour—what happens there is that because most employers want the best employees, they’re paying way more than the $15.” This means the minimum wage doesn’t mean a lot in Alberta anymore, she says, “whereas in this province, because it’s a low-wage province, minimum wage means a hell of a lot.”
As reported by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Nova Scotia (CCPA-NS) in August, the living wage was $28.30 for Halifax and $24 for Cape Breton. Despite this, a July report from CCPA-NS found that “one-third of workers in Atlantic Canada earn[ed] less than $20 an hour.”
The Coast asked the Department of Labour, Skills and Immigration why Nova Scotia doesn’t include Thanksgiving as a general paid holiday for workers and what would be required to change this.
In an emailed statement, the department wrote that the Labour Standards Code “provides the minimum employment standards that all employers must meet” and wrote, “we know that many employers with both unionized employees and non-unionized employees provide paid holiday benefits that exceed these minimum standards.”
Further, the statement says this legislation has been amended recently to add the Nova Scotia Heritage Holiday as a paid holiday beginning in 2015 and that “the department continually monitors all feedback it receives, as well as trends in employment standards across the country, as it considers the need for legislative reform.”
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 6, 2024.