Moving to a new city and a new state always insures that there will be new experiences and unfamiliar features to the landscape, a fact brought home to me today when several of the retail stores we wanted to visit were closed on Sundays. At least one of them actually had a sign on the door stating that they were closed every Sunday so that their employees could devote the time to family and/or worship. Now, in Southern California you may run across the occasional business that follows a practice like this, and of course there are national chains that maintain this policy operating in the Los Angeles area, but to see more than one of them in any given month would be unusual at best. It got me started on the ethics of declaring a specific day of the week off for religious observance, and I thought it deserves a closer look…
The obvious question is whether or not such a policy is fair to those employees whose religion does not have its Sabbath on Sunday. If they celebrate their holy day on Saturday, Friday, or Wednesday for that matter, is it fair that all of the Christians (at least all of the ones from Christian sects who go to church on Sunday) are getting their Sabbath off? A good manager can probably work around that, since there will still be five days available in which any given employee can work, but if the business has a weekly peak on a day that somebody wants to take off, this will be awkward. And no matter how hard they may try, at that point management is (by definition) treating some of its employees differently from the others…
Of course, in some industries it hardly matters; most professional offices (doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on) are closed on the weekends, and anybody who takes a weekday off for purposes of worship is already aware that most of the world will not be joining them. On the other hand, some industries require personnel fully 24/7 (such as cable television companies, telephone companies, health care and the like) and it can be extremely useful to a manager to have people on the payroll for whom Good Friday and Easter Sunday are just another day, or who (in extreme cases) might not even mind working Christmas Day. In both cases this issue will never come up…
Which brings us to the whole issue of religious holidays. If your company observes all Christian holidays, for example, but will not acknowledge those of any other faith, you are basically a discrimination lawsuit looking for a place to happen. To the people who claim that because they practice a specific faith they should only have to honor the religious holidays of that faith, I can only say that if you want that kind of protection for your observances, you’ve also got to grant it to everyone else. To this end, most employers offer their people a specific number of unspecified paid holidays each year (3 is common, although I have seen 2 and 5) which can be used for whatever observance you like, and is also fair to the poor atheists and agnostics in our society, who would otherwise only get our national holidays off…
So is closing the company down on Sundays fair to people who don’t worship on Sunday? I think the answer is that it can be, if the management team is willing to accommodate those people who need another day off. Just don’t ask me what we’re supposed to do when we’re trying to operate in a country that does have a state religion – and they’re taking a religious holiday on a day when we have a critical need to accomplish something…
It’s worth thinking about…
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In addition to actual "days off" how it affects some 'lead off days' should also be considered. When I first moved to Philly and took a position as a paralegal for a firm, it turned out that virtually all the attorneys were Jewish, while virtually all the support staff were Christian. We got Christmas off, but where most firms might close early on Christmas Eve, this firm did not (although the two Christian lawyers left early). Definitely annoyed the staff, all of whom were female and thus had the lion's share of things to do to prepare for Christmas Eve/Day. Sure some staff took the whole day off as a 'vacation' day, but not everyone could do that, some had to be in that day to answer phones, type letters, etc.
A similar situation occurred on Good Friday. The firm was open all day (where some firms actually close on that day), so some staff took a vacation day, or half a day (left the office at noon). But others had to stay and weren't happy about it at all.
One would think that maybe in compensation the firm would be closed on the two big Jewish holidays, Yom Kipper and Rosh Hoshanna. Nope. The partners said that the staff had to work that day unless it was for them a 'religious holiday.' All of the Jewish lawyers were off those days, but the two Christian lawyers worked and thus 'needed staff.'
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