Plant Drops Labor Day For Muslim Holiday

[Texas1911]

I have kept quiet on this as long as I can. This is a "religious issue "pressed up on people that dont subscribe to that particular religion. Labor Day is not a religious holiday. This muslim day is a religious day. I will fight for your right to youre beliefs, but you dont have the rights to force them on others. This is another example of muddling our rights to keep ourselves from offending someone by bowing down to their way of life as they choose to live it.

So what do you say about Easter and Christmas? They are both two Christian holidays that are forced upon those that do not practice Christianity.

 

[JKTex]

So what do you say about Easter and Christmas? They are both two Christian holidays that are forced upon those that do not practice Christianity.

Bingo!!! And these "citizens" acting under the same rights are you and I, asked to be able to celebrate their particular religion, a right our constitution affords us. And not that it's relevant, but I'll be 99.9% of these citizens that are Muslim will spend that day celebrating their religion unlike 99.9% of western Christians will. Their religion is woven into the fabric of their lives where as most Christians feel sticking a little fake chrome fishy on the car and having an Easter Egg hunt is good enough.

How are our constitutional right's being violated when it's our constitutional rights that protect it?

You see the tress yet don't realize they're in a forest.

 

[iratollah]

I worked for a company that scheduled Presidents' Day as an official holiday. Well that's really a Northerner's holiday, so our office pushed to have the option to take Good Friday off instead, which is more of a Southern holiday. Management acquiesced and said it would be a floating holiday where one could choose.

I thought this was great and said that I'd be using this floating holiday to take off for Yom Kippur rather than Good Friday. I was told I couldn't do this. When I asked why we were offered a floating holiday to accommodate one religion but not another, I was told, "If we allow you to have that day off then everyone with some little religious holiday will want to use the floating holiday for that reason." Like 1911 said, while virtually none of my co-workers would be spending Good Friday in church, for Yom Kippur I spend the entire day in shul (synagogue).

I'd see no problem with that factory making the holiday a floating holiday option. The company allows 8 or 10 holidays a year, let people use them as they see fit. At that same myopic company I mentioned, I'd always make a point to be in the office working on Christmas day. No offense intended, but I don't particularly care to have Christian holidays forced onto me for an official day off as they mean nothing to me.

OTOH, if you want to live in America and enjoy our freedoms, you doggone good and well should be making some attempt to assimilate into American traditions. Conflict comes when the majority religion here presumes that their holidays are actually American holidays. Our founding fathers were very clear about the need to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority (Madison, Federalist 10).

 

[idleprocess]

Scheduled holidays may well be gone in another generation.

As evidence, I cite the increasing number of businesses that are open limited hours on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day - the two days of the year that used to be almost totally dead and very nearly sacred in our popular imagination. It's not just movie theaters anymore.

I'm all for eliminating scheduled holidays so long as corporate America reciprocates with an additional 8-10 vacation days for all employees ... and anticipates that most of the workforce will opt to take the traditional holidays off.

 

[oldguy]

I doubt if Tyson hires citizens but that's another issue I certainly don't purchase their products have not for a long time and this issue
does not help matters in my opinion.

 

[Texas1911]

One thing that we have to remember is that Tyson, as a manufacturer, needs to have strict assurance that employees will be there. The floating holiday is a risk since you aren't sure what sort of numbers will show up on either day. There's a critical number of workers needed to operate the plant, fall below that and nothing gets done. The less workers, the greater the risk of injury due to jobs they aren't used to doing.

They need a rigid work schedule.

In an office environment, or say retail, etc. you can be more flexible with days off.

 

[JKTex]

This is actually very funny. While there's all this pissing and moaning going on, 10 days ago they did just what many of you suggested.

Quoted from the AP:

Tyson plant adds Muslim holiday, keeps Labor Day

By ROSE FRENCH – Aug 8, 2008
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Union workers and officials at a Tyson Foods plant in Tennessee said Friday they have agreed to reinstate Labor Day as a paid holiday, and the plant will also observe the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr this year.

Tyson had previously agreed to drop Labor Day and substitute the Muslim holiday as part of a new 5-year contract to accommodate Muslim workers at the plant in Shelbyville, which is about 50 miles south of Nashville. The decision sparked widespread criticism, from local politicians to talk radio to the Internet.

The Springdale, Ark.-based company said it requested reinstating Labor Day after complaints from plant workers and the public.

Union members voted Thursday to reinstate Labor Day as one of the plant's paid holidays and keep Eid al-Fitr as an additional paid holiday for this year only. For the remainder of the contract, workers will have Labor Day and a personal holiday, which can be used to observe Eid al-Fitr or another day the employee's supervisor approves.

Union officials have said at least a couple hundred of the 1,200 plant workers are Muslim.

Eid al-Fitr — which falls on Oct. 1 this year — marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Muslim civil rights advocates criticized Tyson Foods, and a union official said the company's response was disingenuous.

"This wasn't something imposed. It seems that this backtracking would be the result of the backlash from anti-Muslim hate (Web) sites and Islamophobes on the Internet," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Washington D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Stuart Appelbaum, president of the union headquartered in New York, said he was surprised by the reaction to the holiday change.

"I would have thought that people would have been more sensitive and sympathetic to the concern to the members of our community, who want to celebrate their religious faith," he said. "It's a little disingenuous to say that they (Tyson) were responding to employee concerns. The proposal came from workers themselves."

Tyson's previous decision to drop Labor Day as a paid holiday drew intense scrutiny. In a letter to the Shelbyville Times-Gazette newspaper published Thursday, the local mayor and other state elected leaders said substituting Labor Day "for a nontraditional holiday is unacceptable."

"For over a hundred years, Labor Day has stood as a symbol to honor the working men and women of this country. But for the past few years traditions like Labor Day have been under attack. This time it's gone too far and we, as patriotic Americans, must draw our line in the sand," the letter said states.

Requests for workplace accommodations of Muslim religious obligations have become common around the country, say Muslim advocates.
In 2005, 30 workers walked off the job at a Dell Inc. plant in Nashville after alleging the company refused to let them pray at sunset.

Last year, dozens of Somali meatpacking workers at a Nebraska plant quit their jobs because they were not given enough time off for Muslim prayers, though they eventually returned to work at the Swift & Co. plant.