Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The Truncated Thanksgiving Week
The national holiday known as Thanksgiving takes place this week in the United States on Thursday. How do most businesses handle the holiday? Employees go to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The holiday takes place on Thursday, and most companies are smart enough to give employees Friday off, since they'd probably leave early, goof off, or use a vacation day to get a four-day weekend. Since many people travel for the "Traditional Thanksgiving Dinner" which is supposed to be a family affair, they wouldn't be there on Friday anyway.
This leaves three days for work - ostensibly. However, I really have to ask how much work gets done. For example, my boss will be out on Wednesday. Another boss from the same department will also be out on Wednesday. That leaves the two remaining employees - us - basically unsupervised on Wednesday. Not that we don't have work to do, but you have to wonder how much the supervisors care about it if they don't even care to show up.
The first three days of the week, in effect, are spent waiting for the other four. It might make more sense to simply declare a Thanksgiving Week. That would mean the addition of three extra holidays to the work schedule and a slight dip in American productivity year-wide, but is it likely that those employees are going to be doing meaningful work anyway? Every suit-wearing douche is pushing a pencil and already plans to be out the door at lunchtime on Wednesday - if not earlier. Furthermore, with the appaling lack of benefits most American employees receive, why not just give them that time off as a Federal holiday?
"But CINCGREEN," you might ask, "why wouldn't people want the extended holiday for Christmas?" I can give a few reasons:
1. Not everyone is a Christian. For people of other religions, there's no special meaning to having this time off other than just enjoying the time off.
2. Thanksgiving always occurs on the final Thursday of November. If Christmas falls on a weekend, do you put the extra time before Christmas or after it?
In addition, you can have Native American Day become a federal holiday. Currently, Native American day rests on the fourth Friday in September, where it is roundly ignored. You could make Native American day the fourth Wednesday in November. That way, not only is there a chance to recognize the Native Americans nationally and associate their holiday with some time off, but it gives the country some time to reflect on the ambiguities of Thanksgiving itself. (You can imagine how the Native Americans might be lacking some of the requisite spirit, despite the presence of pumpkin pie.)
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2 comments:
At SPSU, we take off Wed-Fri; however, my Monday and Tuesday classes were virtually deserted. It would make a lot more sense if they just gave us the week off, rather than forcing the faculty to teach for two more days that most of their students are not going to bother with.
I think the managerial class in this country, an anti-intellectual group if there ever was one, has no real metric for employee productivity. Instead they rely on their perception of employee immiseration: if it's gonna make somebody unhappy, then by Gum, it's good for the company!
The short period we enjoyed as the pre-eminent world nation is coming to a close, and it was due in large part to having our infrastructure, especially our industrial infrastructure, go unharmed during the Second World War. Unless we re-examine and change our political and organizational cultures, I figure we have about twenty-five years before we become a backward, under-developed nation. Large parts of the USA already look like that anyway.
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