| Please, please, will someone repeal our ghastly blue laws? It's ridiculous enough that our chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General and would-be Governor Tom Reilly, had nothing better to do one day this week than to write a nasty letter to Whole Foods informing them that if they kept their stores open on Thanksgiving Day - paying their employees twice their usual wages in the process - they'd be criminally liable. (The impetus behind the letter? Not disgruntled employees who objected to coming to work - it was Shaw's Supermarkets, a major Whole Foods competitor.) Today we read that police ("acting on a tip") actually forced a supermarket that had missed the warnings to close, and that "the attorney general's office would investigate all reports of illegally opened stores." Great Scott, let's hope these scofflaws see some serious punishment! How are parents supposed to teach their children respect for the law unless swift and harsh justice isn't meted out for such obviously criminal behavior? Seriously, the idea that the power of the state to impose criminal penalties should apply to opening a store on a Sunday or a holiday has, as I've written before, always struck me as utterly absurd. I'm all for legal safeguards such that workers can't be punished for refusing to work on major legal holidays or on the day that they observe the Sabbath. I'd even go along with requiring the payment of extra wages for those workers choosing to work those days. But let's please (1) get these regulations out of the criminal statutes (where they're officially known as the "Common Day of Rest Law") and into the labor code where they belong, and (2) get the all-knowing and beneficent state out of the business of dictating to private enterprises the days on which they may and may not serve the public. For one thing, the state carries out that function extremely badly - really, you have to read these statutes to believe them. I disagree with Globe paleocon columnist Jeff Jacoby on just about everything. But he's right on this one: "The blue laws are and always have been obnoxious deprivations of liberty." Yup. |
