It seems that Sunday trading laws are to be suspended for the Olympics. This has generally been greeted with pleasure and a sense that these laws are an anachronistic hangover from the days when the UK was a largely church-going country.

It’s certainly true that we are now likely to do considerably different things with our leisure time than we were 50 years ago. There is no longer the sense of religious imperative that marks the Christian Sabbath out as a day of rest for all. But does that mean we should scrap Sunday trading laws? I’m not so sure.

For me, Sunday trading has never been about protecting the religious, but about protecting workers – especially those with families.

My husband is a shift worker. On average, he works every other weekend. It means we have less leisure time together. It has benefits and it suits us for now, but if we had a child, I think it would be a shame that we didn’t and couldn’t have one guaranteed family day a week.

Protecting workers rights to work a set amount of hours per week is important. But so is making sure those hours work for the workers. You may miss shopping on a Sunday, but ask yourself how many workers miss working on that day?

Is our need to indulge in consumerism seven days a week greater than the need of those workers to indulge in bonding with families? I’m not convinced it is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 11:11 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.