Not all federal holidays are the same. next Monday Oct. February 12 is Columbus Day, and even though it’s a federal holiday like Christmas or New Year’s, it’s rarely treated as such.
according to data from the society for human resource management last year, only six holidays are widely accepted as paid days off: christmas, independence day, labor day, memorial day, new year’s day and stock thanks. So unless you fall into a few job categories (government offices and many banks are closed, the postal service doesn’t deliver mail), you’ll probably have to report to work on Monday.
how money was explained last year:
race day falls into a category that could be considered second-tier holidays, where a sizable portion of employees have the day off, but most of us are expected to work normally. Of all these days, the day of the race is the one that receives the least respect. While just over a third of organizations are closed to Martin Luther King, Jr. and President’s Day, and 22% are closed on Veterans Day, only 14% are closed on Columbus Day. And the idea that Columbus Day should be a paid day off is on the decline: in 2011, for example, shrm data indicated that 16% of organizations closed in honor of the holiday.
When did the holidays lose their shine and become, for most people, just another day at work? back in 2011, slate attempted to answer that question:
in the early 1990s, congress planned a “quincentennial jubilee” in 1992 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of christopher columbus. 12 landing in the bahamas. The festivities should have sent a replica of La Niña, La Pinta, and Santa Maria sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge in a fatuous re-enactment of the Italian explorer’s “Discovery of America,” but Native American leaders joined the liberals and environmentalists to protest the celebration. corporate sponsors never materialized and the trip was cancelled. the same year, berkeley, calif., renamed the holiday “indigenous peoples day” in recognition of the civilizations that were nearly wiped out in the centuries after columbus’s arrival. In most other places, Columbus Day simply withered over the years, and political controversy served as a cover for employers to deny workers a paid vacation day.
Perhaps the lowest point of the vacation since 1992 came in 2009, at the height of the recession. That’s the year Baltimore and Philadelphia canceled their long-running Columbus Day parades and California eliminated the holiday as a paid day off for government workers, citing budget issues, not ethical concerns.
read below: how indigenous peoples day came to be
write to nolan feeney at nolan.feeney@time.com.