Monday, of course, is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday for school children, government workers and damn near nobody else. Arlo & Janis salutes the half-holiday on which, it is true, people with seniority seem to disappear from otherwise fully-functioning businesses.
In the newspaper industry, we didn't get holidays. For years, there was no paper on Christmas Day, but that was a holiday for the printers, the ad department and circulation. We still had to staff the newsroom. But we would take turns working the holiday itself, and we'd get to take another day off as compensation.
The same was true of Thanksgiving, New Years, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day, although we published on those days. You still got to take a comp day and, as I recall, you got a little kick for holiday pay -- $25 or something.
But Columbus Day, Veterans Day, MLK Day and Presidents Day? Those weren't holidays, any more than Valentine's Day or St. Patrick's Day. And I think that's the case throughout most of the private sector.
I've known people who would use a vacation day to take at least one of those days off, typically Veterans Day or MLK Day. But I've worked at a place where, after a year, you got one week of vacation, and, after seven years, you got a second week. You really had to horde your vacation days.
This is where seniority makes a difference. At one paper, we had a woman who had been there long enough to accrue so much vacation that my theory was she'd retire when the days she actually had to show up reached zero. She managed to take off quite a few of those non-observed holidays, the difference between her and management being that she'd boldly announce that she wasn't coming in. They'd just quietly not be around.
I eventually became management, but never at a place large enough that I could fade out unremarked. In fact, not only did I work the unobserved holidays, but I ended up in the office on most of the observed ones, too.
In the current economy, of course, you should feel grateful to have a job at all, but, on the other hand, if Americans had a greater tradition of taking time off, there might be a slightly larger percentage of people with jobs to be grateful for.
For those of us in the freelance world, there are no holidays. There are simply days in which you don't get mail and can't find anyone. Monday will have no mail, but I suspect I'll be able to get hold of just about anybody I need.
Which is kind of a shame.
I really thought Arlo meant that government workers would be off - no mail/no bills, no IRS etc.
Posted by: Mary in Ohio | 01/14/2011 at 05:19 PM