Heres a good question. Is it illegal for a company to grant Holidays off for a certain religion (jewish), and have all the non-jewish employees work those days. If its a regular federal holiday everyone who is jewish is gone too. Dont know if they get paid (probably do), and non-jewish employees dont receive any compensation. This isnt a anti-jewish thing, just curious…
Nah, I don’t see anything illegal there, especially in retail. One company I worked for lumped it under “Days of Special Concern.”
Jewish employees could take Jewish holidays off, African-Americans could take time off to celebrate Kwanzaa, and rednecks such as myself got the first days of deer season off.
Everybody seemed happy with it.
So employers can give special consideration to certain religious groups, and not to others?? Say, you asked for Kwanzaa off and you are denied… thats illegal I assume??
Yep, that’s illegal. Here, we just all get 2 personal days to use as we see fit–no explanation needed.
Still, if you were to ask for EVERY religion’s holidays off, they might add up to too much … then, trouble.
The way most companies deal with this is to offer “floating holidays” so that the employee can choose which day(s) to take off. I used to be a manager at a company that did not have Martin Luther King, Jr. day as a holiday but I granted a couple of employees’ requests to take that day off and make up the time (we didn’t have floating holidays but we did allow make-up time for snow days and MLK day).
Ah but then if you deny an employee’s request for a reasonable accomodation for time off for a religious observance you buy yourself trouble from the other direction. Aren’t federal civil rights laws fun?
Does anyone have any cites?
I have been associated with Florida Universities - and here is a cite for student religious holidays -
http://www.fsu.edu/Books/Faculty-Handbook/Ch8/Ch8.8.html
The State allows employees to have a holiday (but comes short of calling it a religious holiday)