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U.S. Chamber to Members: It’s Cool to Make Your Employees Work on Christmas
This is a cross-post by Christy Setzer from U.S. Chamber Watch.
Dragging a little today? Desperately trying to focus on work while wishing you were still on a beach? Just be glad you don’t work for a member company of the U.S. Chamber of Congress—you might not have gotten that vacation at all.
In a toolkit for small business owners on the Chamber’s website, the lobbying organization advises modern-day Scrooge employers: “If you need to, you can require that [employees] work on Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, or any other traditional holiday.”
It’s a policy that other large corporations have already taken heat for. Over Thanksgiving, an enterprising Target employee called attention to the consequences of ever-earlier Black “Friday” sales (some starting on Thursday evening) for store employees: not getting to enjoy the holiday with their own families. More than 200,000 employees and customers signed a petition asking Target to drop the family-unfriendly policy, with copycat petitions formed against Kohl’s, Wal-Mart and other big-box stores with similar holiday hours.
The Chamber’s advice may not be surprising for an organization that’s also opposed the 40-hour workweek, paid family and medical leave, and even the federal minimum wage, but no doubt its member companies are taking note: Listen to this particular Dear Abby, only with a great deal of caution.
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7 Comments
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There is an iron clad rule in politics. When the economy is in downfall political repression increases. This is true wherever and whenever and has proven throughout history.
The ruling capitalist class wants to increase their profits at all times but in an economic downturn, and in this case a world wide catastrophe, is determined to drive wages and conditions to levels we have not seen since the early 20th century. To continue to write articles like this and act like it is an apiration is to insult the working classes intelligence and shows either contempt for those you lead or ignorance of the enemies we have to fight.
All I have to say is that Karma can be a bitch…..This may happen to one of their family members in the future. Don’t workers have the right to be with their families on holidays??? What is wrong with these people?
You are absolutely correct, Frisco.
I am hoping that as in the ’30s people will figure out that unions are their protection from some of that.
People continually parrot some idiocy about the need for unions being past (similar to the “post racial” silliness) I believe they are waking up. Please let them wake up.
There is nothing new under the sun dept: A brief historical note:It is not a coincidence that in northern Europe and Britain the middle class was to become the principal bulwark of the Protestant oppositionto Roman Catholicism, feeding the flames of English, German and Swiss nationalism. The traditional Roman Catholic prohibitionof any lending of money at interest as “usury,” the monastic glorification of poverty as an ascetic ideal, and the Roman Catholic system of holidays as times when no work was to be done were all seen by the rising merchant class as obstacles to financial development.
When I was a ticket agent for a bus company & union rep.in NYC, we had to work on Christmas unless it fell on our day off. Our boss always took off & he or she left us with an underling. So, yes it is a joke to have people work on a holiday such as Christmas. Maybe the people where I live, Bergen County, New Jersey has it right, we still have Blue Laws, which means stores are closed.
The Dungeon Of Commerce is the same conspiracy against our economy that asked in Orange County California in the 1990s: what right do farmers who only earn $500,000 a year have to own farmland in an urban area where modern development can make 5 million a month from just one high-rise building? Now I have re-worded that but those words come from an actual article in the Orange County Chamber of Commerce!
We mustn’t expect the Dungeon of Commerce to be any less vile in its regard for the working people who constitute the human-furnishings and the indispensible obligation to serve the masters who take a couple weeks off for the holidays while their “grateful” workers keep the cash-registers and trucks and janitorial services and the data processing equipment functioning with the human touch through the holidays!
Well, I worked on Christmas and New Years and vitrually all other holidays for years. Do you realize that many postal employees work on those holidays. So too do airlines personnel. It’s a tough thing to go to work on xmas eve and hope to get home in time for your kids. We should require that all rich bastards have to spend the winter holidays in an igloo being fed undercooked moose by Palin.