That’s what the days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day are like here, too - I kind of like working them, actually, because it’s like getting paid to surf the internet usually. (A lot of companies do shut down, too, for just that reason - not much business is conducted anyway.)
I think the company shutting down for Thanksgiving and forcing salaried employees to use a vacation day is kind of shitty, though, especially if employees are expected to work longer than eight hours a day if required. Salaries should be a two-way street, although it usually just means that the company gets unpaid work out of the employee.
My employer has gotten around this by having “floating holidays”.
In a standard year, we get 9 set holidays and 2 floating holidays, which are treated pretty much like extra vacation days.
In years like this one, where Christmas is on a Tuesday, one of those floaters is assigned by the company to Dec 24th.
So essencially, I’m having to use a vacation day, but legally, it’s a floating holiday.
There may be another reason. Unused vacation days have to be matched by a reserve to pay for them when taken. This affects the bottom line. At one point my company basically forced everyone to take off the July 4 week to burn off some vacation, which people in general accumulated a lot of.
When I worked for Western Electric the manufacturing locations shut down for a week. I think lots of factories do. It gives time for maintenance, and it is much more efficient over the summer or Christmas than trying to run without enough people. I worked in a research center, but pretty much everyone took off then also. I didn’t the first year when I had no vacation, and I got a ton done.
I should make it clear that the 25 not only is a legal minimum (I get 30, the most I have had at a company here is 32) but it is also additional to public holidays, of which there are twelve.
Not sure how the actual laws go, but for me (postal worker in Finland) they definitely tell us when we take our summer holidays - it is June, then July the next year, then June again etc. We get no say in the dates, and given how strong the postal worker union is I doubt it is against the law. Winter holidays are different, those we can have whenever between September and April as long as all of us don’t try to take the same week off. Roughly 5 weeks per year + holidays for me total with the holidays being unpaid vacation and the rest paid.
They can not reduce the pay of a salaried employee if they are willing to work that day and the company decides to close the office.
They can make you use a vacation or personal day though if you still have them.
If they close for the whole week then they can not pay you for that week, but if a salaried person works at all during a week they need to be paid their regular salary.
(A lot of companies do shut down, too, for just that reason - not much business is conducted anyway.)