Loading ...Tyson offers accommodation to Muslim employees
flockwoodBy The Associated Press
SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. – Workers at the Tyson Foods poultry processing plant in Shelbyville will no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but will instead be given the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr as a holiday.
According to a news release from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a new five-year contract at the plant included the change to accommodate the hundreds of Somali Muslims who work at the plant .
Eid al-Fitr — which falls on Oct. 1 this year — marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Union leaders say implementing the holiday was important for the nearly 700 Muslims, many of them Somalis, who work at the plant that employs a total of 1,200 people.
The Shelbyville Times-Gazette newspaper quotes union spokesman Randy Hadley as saying the negotiating team felt this change was “extremely crucial, since this holiday is as important to Muslims as Christmas is to Christians.”
The newspaper also quotes the union as saying two prayer rooms have been created at the Shelbyville Tyson Foods’ plant ” to allow Muslim workers to pray twice a day and return to work without leaving the plant.”
August 4th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Well… heaven forbid workers getting an “extra” day off… might as well “accommodate” them by axing labor day… rather ironic, really.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:23 am
Isn’t it wonderful that the other 500 employees are forced to give up an American tradition for over 100 years to accommodate a religion–where is the separation of religion and state laws? I believe if I were working in this plant, as a christian I might be offended.
August 5th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Nore background on this at snopes.com .
Important facts to note: The measure was something requested by the union, not foisted upon the employees by Tyson. It concerns one plant. It was unanimously approved by the union negotiating committee and then by 80% of the union members at the plant who voted.
All those in favor of democracy and freedom of religion, lay down your torches and pitchforks.
It doesn’t say if Tyson employees are allowed to use vacation or personal days to observe holidays that fall on work days, but that’s pretty standard practice. Ask those in the American workforce who are observant Jews or Muslims. Many companies do not shut down for Good Friday and yet devout Catholics manage somehow. One might expect that Labor Day will continue to be well observed by the good citizens of Shelbyville.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
“It was unanimously approved by the union negotiating committee and then by 80% of the union members at the plant who voted.”
The point being?
Labor unions who are so weak that they propose giving up labor day highlights the plight of American workers. Why wouldn’t they just request this day off without a switch? Would 80% of French, German, or Italian workers voted to accept such an “accommodation?” Would 80% have voted that way if they thought they could get a better offer? Why don’t we just expect corporations like Tyson to accommodate their workers without the switch?
And the good citizens of Shelbyville, especially the white collar ones, might well enjoy their extra day off… but the workers for whom the day was intended will be laboring in the plant. That is really pretty sad.
This is what has happened to liberalism in this country… too focused on cultural and identity politics, on symbolic battles and on yesterday’s conflicts, no longer actively advocating for workers or the working class.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Math is not my forte, but if 50% of the vote is 600 people, then 80% ought to be close to the 700 employees, therefore the rest of the 500 people who were not Muslim were outvoted, on an American holiday–not a religious holiday.
I agree with UK that the company should have given those who wanted the day off for religious reasons the availability to use their own time and keep the National holiday in tact.
OH, BTW Jose: as a hospital worker for more than 30 years–Good Friday and Easter were never considered Holidays with paid time off. If I wanted off, I had to use vacation time.
August 5th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
UK, are you talking about them having both Labor Day and Eid as paid holidays? I guess the union could have been aggressive and insisted on increasing the number of paid holidays by one. But that’s a different topic from this, which is swapping one for the other. If one begins with the assumption that the company would only agree to eight paid holidays then the question is whether the workers were right–however you define “right”–to substitute Eid for Labor Day. I’ll agree that it is strange, a union disrespecting Labor Day, but there you have it.
Peach, I have to question your assumptions again. The report said that there were 1200 employees of which about 700 are Muslims. It did not say how many employees voted. If all 1200 voted and all 700 of the Muslims were in favor of Eid then more than half of the non-Muslims also voted in favor of the measure. Or perhaps the non-Muslims didn’t care to vote so they lost their voice in the matter. Or maybe all the Christians voted in favor of Eid! We really don’t know that “the 500 people who were not Muslim were outvoted” and we ought to be careful about stating opinions as facts.
Another thing, Peach. You said “the company should have given those…” That’s a little misleading in regards to who did what. As the Tyson Foods rep said, “This is not a religious accommodation, rather, it is part of a union-initiated contract demand.” I don’t see where the company is to blame for this one. If the workers want a different holiday schedule and it doesn’t affect the company’s bottom line, you have to ask why the company should fight over the issue. Heck, if the workers insisted on Good Friday instead of Presidents Day or MLK Jr. Day, wouldn’t it make sense for the company to agree then too? I think so.
August 6th, 2008 at 5:57 am
Jose: Obviously you have never worked under union rules. I can almost guarantee that 700 employees did vote in favor — unless they were sick that day. I am sure the some of the others probably understood that they would receive both holidays. What ever the case Labor day is a National Holiday–not a religious–and I emphasize an American Holiday.
Now the only THING I assume is that you are in knowledge of everything but lack wisdom and compassion when dealing with general labor force.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Let’s do the numbers here. There are, according to the snopes.com piece and the news release from Tyson, 1000 unionized workers at the plant (out of the total of 1200 workers). Of these, 250 are Somali Muslims. The news release said that 80% of the union workers voted in favor of the plan. That’s 800 workers, of whom (assuming that all the Somalis voted for it) 550 were non-Muslim. So, even if you remove the 250 Somalis from the mix, that means that the presumably Christian workers voted 550-200 for the plan, or 73% approval among the Christians, as opposed to 80% among everyone. Either way you slice it, this was overwhelmingly popular among the rank and file workers. If we had a presidential election where either side got either 73% or 80% of the vote, it would be the biggest landslide in history.
This was a plan brought to the company by the union, not the other way around. If we believe in the power of employees to organize and make their will known to their employers through the collective bargaining system, then we should applaud this. After all, to paraphrase Jesus, Labor Day was made for the laborer, not the laborer for Labor Day. If the workers themselves overwhelmingly approved this, who has the standing to disagree?
What the whole brouhaha is about is a left-handed swipe at Barack Obama. Between now and November, if a Muslim gets a speeding ticket somewhere, they’ll say Obama was behind it, just as the right wing has used this incident to drum up religious prejudice against him.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Sorry Gentlemen: the article states: 1200 workers, 1,000 of that is union–meaning 200 are probably in management and unable to vote with the union.
250 are Somali’s, but 700 are Muslims–which it states this is a Muslim holiday– which leaves 50 non-Muslim union voters
Now what all this adds up to is that Tyson only gives it’s plant workers 8 holidays, they can choose between labor day and Eid Al-Fitr. It cannot give one plant more than 8 holidays, and as this particular plant would have 700 of the 12,000 workers off-even if they used vacation time, they would still have to close the doors for a day. So, why not offer a contract stating another day–instead of.
Have either of you two walked a picket line before? I have. It has nothing to do with OBAMA.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Peach, the email to which the snopes.com article refers says:
“Tyson drops Labor Day holiday for Eid al-Fitr
You can bet that this action by Tyson is only the begining to removing more of the
holidays and other symbols that made the United States of America the greatest
country on earth.
FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR FAMILY, BE VERY CAREFUL WHOM YOU VOTE FOR IN
NOVEMBER.”
I’ll walk a mile with you on any picket line you like if you can explain to me what part of that email is NOT about Obama.
I wouldn’t vote to take a Muslim holiday, but it’s not me picking the feathers off chickens, either. These are people who work very hard for their meager pay, and if they want a familiar holiday, I don’t begrudge it to them.
The reason this is a story is because of the ethnicity of the people and their religion. If they’d voted to take Cinco de Mayo off instead of Memorial Day, the howl would have been that we’re pandering to the Hispanics. If they had voted to take off Chinese New Year, the story would be that we’re pandering to the Chinese immigrants. But right now the biggest story in the country is Obama, and anything that has anything to do with Islam will be thrown at him like mud, fairly or not. We’ve got to decide if we’re going to be a multicultural society or not, and if we are, we’ve got to accomodate views that didn’t come over on the Mayflower.
August 6th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
“If we believe in the power of employees to organize and make their will known to their employers through the collective bargaining system, then we should applaud this. After all, to paraphrase Jesus, Labor Day was made for the laborer, not the laborer for Labor Day. If the workers themselves overwhelmingly approved this, who has the standing to disagree?”
Clever.
Yet also an exercise in smugly skirting my points: American workers have too little leverage in the work place, get far too little time off as it is, and that “accommodations” such as this are woefully limiting.
If one accepts that the “reality” is that the company will only agree to such a switch and this is the best deal the laborers could possibly get, then the unions negotiations are to be praised. I just think we, as a nation, fundamentally lose when we accept this as “reality.”
It is a sad day when a labor union is reduced to using “Labor Day” (a sad compromise of a holiday, really… we should be celebrating it on May 1st) as a bargaining chip. Whatever other political issues get attached to this story (I agree with your linking this to Obama), this is a jarring development in and of itself.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I guess I don’t understand your problem with this, UKLutheran. I was addressing Peach’s concerns, not yours, so I didn’t tailor my comments to you; rather than “skirting” your points, I was merely ignoring them. I can’t imagine why it’s any less appropriate to celebrate a Muslim holiday as it is Christmas or Thanksgiving, which, I’ll bet, are among the eight paid holidays these workers get. I don’t necessarily like the symbolism of labor day as the holiday to be given up, but what was the choice? What would the vote have been if they’d wanted to give up Thanksgiving or Christmas, or the Fourth of July? The beginning of October is close enough to labor day that it seems logical to lose that one if one has to be lost.
As a socialist of the old variety, yes, I agree that May Day should be a holiday, and possibly Che Guevara’s birthday as well. I also think we should have universal health care and a retirement system that works. But we don’t. As a populist, I think there ought to be a special tax on expensive cars, homes, trophy wives, and fancy haircuts. But there isn’t.
The other thing we don’t have is labor unions with any teeth. Perhaps that has led to my other kvetches; in most countries that have decent social services, labor was in the lead in swaying public opinion on those issues. Here, organized labor is dead, and it doesn’t look good for a resurrection any time soon. I think this is a good example of a union actually doing something that its members wanted done, something that hasn’t happened very often lately.
August 7th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I apologize, Caleb, for assuming the comments were directed at me and responding as though they were.
It seems we pretty much agree on the issue.
August 7th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Even the part about Che Guevara’s birthday? If so, you’re scaring me, UKLutheran . . . I thought I was the last old fashioned leftist around.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Well, what do you know….
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080808/ap_on_bi_ge/tyson_labor_day
Guess I have to scale back my criticism of Tyson and the union. A small victory!
(American workers still get too few days off anyway)
August 9th, 2008 at 11:12 am
For making this offer, Tyson can only come out for the best. Everyone is happy with the Labor-day holiday intact.