I got a lot of calls and emails today from people who work for companies that I assumed would have been closed because it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day has always seemed like one of those holidays open to enormous interpretation and frankly I don’t get it.
Companies seem to have all sorts of reasons for making Martin Luther King Jr. Day optional and you can read more about the ambiguity of MLK day over on Cynical Girl. Some say it is too costly to make a paid day off, it lands too closely to the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, or that people would rather have a day off at another time. Some companies make it a movable holiday, i.e. give up MLK Day and get the day after Thanksgiving off. And while the day is considered a national holiday, not all schools are closed either, which you would think would give kids a mixed message.
So what you are left with when a company makes the holiday optional, is a corporate culture that has the potential to become polarized which goes against everything the holiday stands for. The people who want the holiday off may resent taking a personal day or unpaid day to observe it or may feel slighted that it is a day off, but at the expense of another day, as if the day isn’t as much of a holiday than others such as Labor Day or Memorial Day.
It just seems like bad business practice to make the holiday so loose and open to interpretation. You are bound to piss someone off. And I guess you could argue that there are other groups that feel that their holidays aren’t given as much credence as more mainstream American holidays such as the Jew who has to take personal or unpaid days to observe Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur.
But I don’t think that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is really about a specific group. And while its focus stems from an African American who championed the rights of other African Americans, his message is about equal rights for everyone. Let’s face it. Whether you are an African American, a Latino, a woman, a Jew, a Catholic, a Muslim, someone with a disability, gay, lesbian, transgender, an older American, a younger American, or anyone in between, chances are that you have been discriminated against at some point in your life. Heck, there is even name discrimination.
So I think it’s good that there is one day a year where we honor Dr. King, but more importantly take time to reflect on the destruction of discrimination and the value of tolerance. And I think it’s about time that we all got on the same page when it comes to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. What do you think?