There are about a dozen national holidays in the year. When I was young, it was the common practice to give workers the day off on such a national holiday. Oh, I admit that not every national holiday was observed, but certainly almost all employees in most of the country received most of those holidays off with pay. But, there has been a change since I was young. What has been the change? Here are some quotes from an article on the issue:
Perhaps the holiday’s lowest moment since 1992 came in 2009, at the height of the recession. That’s the year Baltimore and Philadelphia canceled their long-running Columbus Day parades and California dropped the holiday as a paid day off for government workers—citing budget woes, not ethical misgivings.
Federal workers and the employees of 24 states still get the holiday, but they’re now in the minority. Even the Explainer’s parents, school administrators in Ohio’s capital city, are at work today. When a place called Columbus stops celebrating Columbus Day, it’s clear the holiday is out of favor.
There are various reasons why Columbus Day stopped being observed. However, to put it in a fuller context, for many workers in the USA, the Federal holidays are no longer being observed. What do I mean by not being observed? When I was young, up in Ohio, it used to be common to observe national holidays. This meant that if you did not work the holiday, you were paid for it. Nowadays, that has long gone away. Today the argument is that if you work the holiday you get another day off and you should be happy. Moreover, there is no extra pay for working a national holiday. That used to be common, but in today’s Tea Party and “pro-business” environment, there is almost no reason to pay anything extra to an employee. My children have trouble believing that there used to be a time that people were paid extra for working national holidays or paid 8 hours regular pay if they did not.
It has become the normal and acceptable practice to claim that an employer should only pay an employee for 40 hours paid. But, there was a time when, besides the two week of vacation, employees received most of the national holidays. That time is gone. In almost all of the world, the common current practice is for an employee to have close to one month of vacation a year. That is not the common practice in the USA. The former explanation for that practice was that the USA was more productive than other countries. That has not been true for quite a while. So, that means that for quite a while that claim has not been anywhere near the reality of what is happening in the USA.
We are the country that has the least amount of vacation time in the world. When we were the number one country, that might have made sense. Frankly, it did not make sense even back then. It makes even less sense today. Over the last ten years, the average income of an USA citizen has been dropping while the income of those in the top 1% has been rising. Moreover, over the last 30 years, employees in most states have been losing the holidays that they used to receive. In spite of that, it is called class warfare if people protest in front of Wall Street.
Let me be clear, the more that time passes, the more I am convinced that the Tea Party has little to do with Christian social ethics. The more that time passes, the more I am convinced that Saint James was right when he said that it is the “rich that oppress you.” Does this mean that it is wrong to be rich? No, it is not. But, the reality is that Saint James is right. And, until the churches in America can say that Saint James is right, until that time the churches in America will not have a correct view of the economic reality of what is happening in the USA. Sadly, all the economic statistics in the USA, keep pointing to the increase of net income by the “rich” while the net income of those who are not continues to decrease. Sadly, the Tea Party folk keep trying to defend the indefensible, that which goes completely against what Saint James (and others) say.
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