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 coworkers, 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.”
This week, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego introduced The Holiday Pay Act to require companies to pay time-and-a-half to employees who work federal holidays. “Many Americans are working holidays because they need the money and giving up precious time with family and loved ones to do so,” Gallego said in a statement. “They deserve to be fairly compensated for their sacrifice.”
This is happening amid long-term trends: Jobs are getting worse, families are getting squeezed by energy and health-care costs and priced out of the market for housing, and wages have not kept up. Advocates have been fighting for a higher minimum wage since 2012, and have been increasingly turning to unions to make their jobs better. Yet despite a brief blip during President Joe Biden’s administration and the Covid pandemic, when the federal government expanded protections and the social safety net, most of Washington hasn’t really taken up the call. That could change as Democrats look toward a future after Trump.
Nancy Ramos, who also works for LanguageLine in Texas, had to work over the Fourth of July while her family had a cookout. On top of that, she’d had a medical procedure done and asked for time off, but didn’t get it. “They said to schedule my appointment on a day that I’m off, that that’s why I was off on Tuesdays,” she said. “That I needed to find time around my schedules for my doctor’s visit because I had other days off.”
(In response to questions, LanguageLine said that it employs full-, part-time, and contract workers around the world, while it also uses workers employed through partner agencies. Workers can request time off in advance, and can take unscheduled health breaks of up to five minutes offline in addition to regular lunch and 15-minute breaks for every four hours of work.)
American workers want to be treated like a human and not a robot. They want their time and energy and effort to be properly valued. They want corporations to understand that their skills can’t be replaced easily with technology. And they want a party that fights for that, loudly and without hesitation. Asking the federal government to compel companies to recognize national holidays is a small part of that, but it would mean a lot to many millions of workers.
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