Labour Day and Lawyering
Today’s blog is short because I hope that most recipients will be winding down towards their long weekend by the time that our newsletter arrives on their computers.
I don’t know about you, but I always think of our September long weekend as merely that—a long weekend often before children return to school where we get one last hurrah at summer. Most of us are grateful to whatever labour-oriented movement led to the creation of a holiday Monday and don’t give it any more thought.
But the history of the Canadian labour movement might be slightly interesting to lawyers. Evidently, 12-hour days were commonplace in Canadian industries in the 19th century. Printers in Toronto staged a strike in 1872 seeking a nine-hour workday and 58-hour workweek. Wow—those sound like lawyers’ hours!
You can learn more about this strike, the legalization of trade unions in Canada and the political forces that led to the declaration of the first Canadian Labour Day in 1894 in the Canadian Encyclopedia.
And McGill University law professors are currently on strike, seeking better pay and the right to unionize: Sometimes what is old is new again.
For lawyers and articling students, the nine-hour workday, fifty-eight hour work week sounds like the holy grail. When we work long days and weeks, we fantasize about interesting and challenging legal positions where you can go home at a reasonable hour. We use mantras like “this too will pass” and we often lack empowerment (or permission) to seek positions with more reasonable hours.
I have written before about being a corporate lawyer whose father was a union leader. The work that I did tied me to management, and it is common for us to begin to see things from our clients’ perspectives. I remember my dad suggesting that junior lawyers needed a union and cringing with embarrassment. You see, my thinking went, we junior lawyers are actually privileged to have the positions we had—why would we think otherwise and campaign for structures that weren’t designed for professionals like us?
And I remember when Labour Day was, like other long weekends, a free Monday to spend in the office to crank out work without the usual interruptions! And the irony of this—that I was viewing a holiday in honour of the improvement of working conditions while I was piling on hours-- was completely lost on me.
Remember that this Labour Day, we are generally free to choose (within bounds) how to spend our holiday Monday (even if it means you log 20 hours on the Saturday and Sunday). If you are in a position where you are expected to spend Labour Day in the office and you are happy with that—great! Go for it!
But if you are feeling exhausted, burned out and frustrated that you will be working rather than enjoying the end of the summer season, please consider whether your feelings are unique to Labour Day this year. Perhaps you did not take a summer vacation due to plans later in the year. Perhaps you have just come off a demanding project and need a catch-up day, and your malaise this year is the exception and not the norm. But if you look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself that this is the last Labour Day you will spend in the office, please call Assist.
We deal with career change issues in both our professional counselling program and in our peer support program. We regularly match callers who want to talk to a lawyer who has left a type or area of practice for work-life balance reasons or to avoid burnout. Sharing experiences is important because we tend to have voices in our heads telling us that we cannot make changes and to just put our heads done, noses to the grindstone, and hope no one notices that we are miserable. And sometimes we attribute wisdom to these voices when they are actually speaking out of fear, and knowing that someone else has made a change that you dream to make is empowering.
Our professional counsellors can help you process your feelings of dissatisfaction and to develop a plan towards a more fulfilling career plan. They can also normalize that when you feel dissatisfied with your current situation, job or otherwise, it is normal—and sometimes even necessary—to accept the feelings you are feeling and to take steps to address them.
Lawyers often believe that they need to “suck it up” and do what everyone around them, in their workplace, is doing. But this is rooted in a false belief that we are all the same and that what is tolerable to a co-worker must be tolerable to us. Feeling different or wanting something different does not make us weaker or less worthy to practice law. But it may mean that you want to find a work environment where you can be your authentic self.
I’m going to close with one of my favourite all-time quotations, from Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach, a small “s” spiritual book:
I chose to go to law school so that I would be a professional in control of my career, which would allow me to make personal decisions about work-life balance. It didn’t work quite the way I thought it would—you couldn’t just decide to have a lower billing target as there were economic realities that made paying the rent important! But I spent many years working part-time, in a job-share, and running my own small practice so that I could approximate work-life balance most of the time. I am sharing that I did this for many years, and was then able to return to the regular workforce doing work that I love not because I am exceptional but because I’m not at all exceptional. And if I found a way to make less-than full-time conventional lawyer work work for me, so can you.
If you have the dream of practicing law differently—whatever that means to you—you can take steps towards achieving your dream, and you can start by calling Assist.
Loraine