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A festive message to folk working over Christmas.
While most folk manage to spend the festive season off work, spending times wi our friends and family playing monotonous games with our “loved ones” spare a thought for the unlucky ones – the folk who have to work on Christmas day, serving those people who still think Christmas day involves something else than getting pissed and falling asleep on a couch.
As appalling as a lot of workers rights are in the UK, most folk still at least get Christmas off or get paid an improved rate for working over the holidays. But some supermarkets have tried to pull a fast one by only offering staff a Sunday rate for working boxing day this year. Some supermarkets are also bullying their staff into ‘volunteering’ to work over Christmas. In England tube workers are going on strike to secure triple pay and a day off in lieu for working on Boxing Day.
It’s ironic because the origins of Boxing Day come from Victorian Britain’s class divided society. The rich folk would have a great Christmas Day, wi presents, food made by their servants, entertainment provided etc but obviously for this to happen they’d need lots of folk to work for them. So the servants worked on Christmas Day, but got the day off on Boxing Day – as a kind of cheaper, low budget holiday for the plebs, but where they would get boxes of gifts from their masters – hence Boxing Day.
With massive unemployment in the UK just now refusing a request/order to ‘volunteer’ working on public holidays is a lot harder to do – your manager will be happy to point out all the other folk who will be more flexible than you in your job if it’s time for redundancies. USDAW has produced a set o guide to your rights in work over Christmas, when you can refuse to work, how long and how much pay you can expect.
There are certain industries and services that do have to work over Christmas – and folk should be paid extra from working away from their families, and it shouldn’t always be the same folk – but low paid workers shouldn’t be intimidated or forced to work over the holiday period because they’re scared for their jobs. If that happens we go back to the Victorian celebrations of Christmas where loads of the servants couldn’t enjoy Christmas Day because they were working - except this time, workers might not even get Boxing Day.