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Meanwhile all the schools in my area are polling places so kids don’t have school.
In most civilized countries, voting takes place on weekends and your employer is legally obligated to let you leave work to go vote
And why is presidents day called Washington’s birthday?
Dudes working at most hourly lower end type jobs still wouldn’t get election day off, unless you mandated like octuple pay for anyone working that day (They should)
Because they don’t want the workers voting.
If you “can’t go to the ballot because you need to work” you are a plebeian, and so they have a way of excluding you while technically not excluding you.
A lot of modern oligarchy is powered by these technicalities. Technically everyone has a “right to” participate in the system, but the whole apparatus is rigged in such a way that in material reality only the same nobility caste that has called the shots since the bronze fucking age gets to call the shots.
By law employers are required to allow their workers an opportunity to vote. The problem is other stuff like taking their kids to school and having to go to work right after and by the time you make it to the poll through rush hour traffic, the line is out the door and they shut it down and don’t let you vote even though you waited for an hour.
So the bare minimum that even my little Eastern European hellhole could do was that a polling place closing means that those in line can still vote.
A poll worker gets in line exactly at closing time, and those in front get to vote however long that takes. It’s not hard to organize.
The law also doesn’t require employers to pay for that time, so many can’t afford to take the time off even if their employer is chill about it.
Oh no it’s never paid, but they have to allow them time to vote. Usually that means wake up at 6am to get to the polls by 7
it’s never paid
As a salaried worker your pay will not change just because you took time off to vote. So it is de facto requires to pay for the time, but only for those who already have the privilege of a salaried position.
Edit to make my point even more clear: the current law is structural discrimination against poor people.
You are arguing semantics on whether it’s paid or not. No one cares. The point is, paid or not, your job has to give you time to vote, usually at the employees expense.
Thanks for your reply! I am not arguing semantics at all. I am pointing out an inherent disadvantage faced by lower paid workers in an unfair system. Which is the entire point of this discussion. The fact that you don’t care about a few hours of paid time perfectly demonstrates that the privileged benefactors of the current system don’t even realize that others are being actively oppressed through technicalities of the law.
My roommate asked for time off to vote; her employer literally laughed at her. Now, there is legal recourse there, and she would have likely won and even gotten awarded a money judgment.
But she needed that job without interruption. This was in Canada, by the way.
The thing is
“The law says it has to happen” doesn’t mean it happens.
And the weaker labour protections are in your country, the more bosses can walk all over their employees.
In the US, with their so-called “at-will” employment system, you can be fired at any time for any reason, and if you need the job to like, live, you won’t even bring up your legal rights.
Mind you even on countries where polling happens exclusively on Sunday (like mine!) there are other subtle ways The Poors tm are kept from enfranchisement. “Voting happens on a work day” is just one of the ways it happens in one of our world’s oligarchies.
If you’re in food service, election day is likely an all hands on deck situation. Incredibly shitty. And here in the US a ton of people work weekends. I didn’t get a job that had weekends off until my mid 30s.
We should just have elections on presidents day.
And that way presidents day finally has an actual purpose.
I’d feel weird voting for other stuff on a day called presidents Day now. Maybe we should add more days. Like governors day and mayors day. Oh and county comptroller day!!! We should have cookouts on that day also, obviously.
You are getting President’s Day off?
Because Republicans don’t want you to vote if you have the kind of job that you can’t just take whatever time you want off.
You can’t tell me you don’t understand why this is
Voter suppression
If people actually voted, they might vote for people the oligarchy doesn’t like. Bet you didn’t think about that, huh? Checkmate libruls!
No, I literally can’t even vote for someone the oligarchs don’t control. They don’t make it to the ballot.
100% this
Bcs the few are important & worshipped, the many are expendable and barely deserving of human-level acknowledgment.
/s
(or at least I wish it was sarcasm)We have it in Malaysia if the polling date is in weekdays, and we usually have general election on Saturday so most people have no reason not to vote. And even then, we have law that said employer cannot stop employees from going to vote and this is heavily enforced. Though our election is only one day, and once the polling station close, anything or anyone that arrive afterward is not counted
Sure, here you go: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7329
One of many such bills.
Take a look at the sponsors. I’ll give you 1 guess at which party would vote it down, because it would hurt them in elections.
It’s the same reason Puerto Rico will never be a state.
Like 95% of the US get neither off
Yeah, my current position is this way, and I’m a $programmingLanguage Developer.
Even if you made it a federal holiday, the wage slaves would still have to work.
how are federal holidays not mandatory time off dude there’s a reason they exist. what a backwards country.
edit: apparently the concept is so foreign that people don’t understand how these things work. of course there will be exceptions but of you work on a holiday you get a full day’s salary as overtime. this usually assures employers only force work when necessary because most would rather not pay extra. and of course further exceptions can be made into the law. no one said life should stop when there’s a holiday.
Black and white rules always end up fucking someone over. For example I work in the entertainment industry and a lot of my income is from working on holidays, specifically because they are holidays. That aspect of my job is not exploitative, and if the option were taken away I would have big problems.
I work in a hospital. Unfortunately, people don’t stop being sick on holidays, so someone has to work. I don’t see how it could be different in any other country.
Yep. Your boss can still say no and just give you a day in lieu
At least make it a sunday lol, a tuesday wtf?!!
Good point, the real solution is to spread out the election and make voting easier, as in mail-in.
