Can a Jewish person be required to work Hanukkah?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@FatBaldGuy

I think it depends on how you define “contract.” Many firms have a written “policies and procedures” handbook which an employee is required to sign that he has received and agrees to follow. This could be construed as a contract in most cases.

That’s not at all what is normally considered to be an employment contract. Such a contract is almost always specific to the individual or the job, not a company handout.

[Gfactor]

@FatBaldGuy

This could be construed as a contract in most cases…

To expand on **Random’s ** post, this argument was made, with some success, in the 80s. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2001/01/art1full.pdf (pdf pages 7-10). Employers quickly rose to the challenge by revising their handbooks to avoid anything that looked like a promise, making every employer decision discretionary, and including at-will employment language. They usually also stuck in some other disclaimer language that says “these are company policies. We can change them whenever we want. We don’t have to follow them. This isn’t a contract. You are an at-will employee. You don’t have any rights other than those provided by law.” As the attached pdf says,

Employers can prevent written assurancesfrom creating an implied contract by including a clear and unambiguous disclaimer characterizing those assurances as company policies that do not create contractual obligations.

So while it can happen in some cases, they are pretty rare these days. This guy talks about some of them. D. Michigan in the Toussaint Era – Employment-at-Will in Michigan: A Case for Retaining the Doctrine – Mackinac Center

[According_to_Pliny]

Why do you think jews are a different case? Don’t cops and firemen, plus their secretaries and message services, agree to take their hoidays when sceduled by the boss, not their church?

[Gfactor]

@According to Pliny

Why do you think jews are a different case? Don’t cops and firemen, plus their secretaries and message services, agree to take their hoidays when sceduled by the boss, not their church?

See posts 8, 14, 15, and 18.

[suranyi]

Forget for a minute about Hanukkah, which is a bit of a red herring. The real issue are the important holidays like Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur, on which religious Jews are forbidden to work (for at least some of Passover, that is).

For the religious Jews that I know, and I’ve known quite a few, the answer is simple. They just don’t take a job where they might be asked to work on one of those days, unless it’s literally life-or-death.

Either they work for small businesses owned by other religious Jews, so the whole company is closed on those days, or they’ve negotioted agreements with their bosses such that they take those days off (perhaps in exchange for working days such as Christmas, or by taking vacation days), or they are in a profession such as medicine, where Jewish law makes an exception.

A religious person simply wouldn’t work at a company if there was a chance he might be forced to work on a major Jewish holiday. It would be a dealbreaker.

Ed