Holiday work schedules

I only bitch about working holidays when I work 5 or 6 of them and my co-workers work 1 or 2. Otherwise, I'm more than happy to do my part. Fortunately, it's been several years since I used to get the holiday schedule shaft shoved up my ass.

 

That's how newspapers continue to put out the product day after day. 80 percent of the workers have it brainwashed into their heads that they are lucky to just be employed with benefits. You can bet newspapers would love to strip their employees of benefits but haven't stooped that low, yet.

 

I woke up this morning.

I woke up healthy this morning.

I woke up healthy this morning with no pain and with the ability to walk wherever I wanted, see whatever I wanted and hear whatever I wanted.

And after all that I have a place of employment to go to . . . with benefits!

Damn right I feel lucky. Ten times luckier than you can imagine.

It's the difference between going through life happy, and going thtough life miserable.

 

To all my haters ... do you really think any of your sports writers who covered games on Christmas Day at home, especially on the road, got paid for their work that week? I mean the exact hours worked? Of course not, they dutifully wrote in 40 hours on their timecards and that was that. They'll get to make it up during the offseason, wink wink. Sure they will. Not exactly. They sign that they worked 40 so the company pays 'em 40. Tell them you want pay for 60-70 hours, bye bye.

 

I've experienced life as an independent contractor without group benefits (and might be forced into that situation again sooner rather than later). So yes, I do feel lucky to be employed with health coverage through the company (especially now, when my wife is dealing with a medical situation that would be costing us thousands without decent coverage).

Also don't forget that at least for now, the Affordable Care Act more or less makes it mandatory for companies with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health coverage. Between newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and ad services, my employer has something like 15,000 full-timers. Stripping employees of benefits, or at least health coverage, isn't that simple or realistic (although it's true that my company has replaced a lot of full-time positions with part-timers in its newsrooms, which is one way around the law).

 

Had I not decided to teach a winter mini-mester (it's not a trivial amount of extra money), my last obligations of the fall semester would have been on Dec. 10 (when I donned my oh-so-studly gown and tam for commencement). My first day back would have been on Jan. 18.

 

A couple of the companies we deal with are off until Jan. 10. One of them let us in the place today, but later than scheduled because not everyone has made it back from the Caribbean.

 

As the only person on staff who was Jewish, I used to work every Christmas. As the person who had far-away family, I ended up trying to work a ton of holidays at my last job. Granted, we had a design center, so the shifts were very low-impact for time an a half.

 

Everybody has a price.

 

I don't know anyone that does this. And if they do, they're foolish. Every person I know in HR is scared to death of this kind of situation and they've been educating their management on the legalities of it (that it's illegal) and that the new overtime law makes it that much worse. Where are these newspapers and who are these over-worked writers you speak of Frederick, because I think you're full of shit.