Ruben Gallego Wants You to Get Paid More for Working on Holidays |
Ruben Gallego Wants You to Get Paid More for Working on Holidays
Federal law does not guarantee it. The Democratic senator from Arizona wants to change that.
This past Christmas, Yuliia Moshkova had to hurry to open presents with her family before her work shift started at 8 a.m. She works from her home in Louisiana as a Russian-to-English interpreter for LanguageLine Solutions, a call-in translation service that contracts with companies around the United States. When Moshkova’s shift was over at 4:30 p.m., she rushed to cook a Christmas meal. “It’s pretty hard to cook something for your family,” when you’ve worked all day, Moshkova said. “It doesn’t feel like a normal holiday when family can’t spend time together.”
Many of LanguageLine’s clients are hospitals, insurance companies, and similar services that deal with emergencies, so someone has to work on holidays—and there’s always a need for translation for non-English speakers. Unlike many other Americans, however, the workers at LanguageLine say they don’t receive holiday pay to compensate them for their work on federal holidays. For Moshkova and her co-workers, this was a surprise when they first started working there. “I’ve been working since I was 16 years old,” said Sara Ramirez, who works as a Spanish-English interpreter for LanguageLine in Texas. “And this is the first company that I’ve ever worked with that did not honor holidays or at least offer some kind of compensation if you were forced to work the holiday.”
That’s because they don’t have to. The federal government recognizes 11 holidays, and most government workers and private-sector employees either get those days off or are compensated extra for being asked to work on a day normally spent with family and........