Ruben Gallego Wants You to Get Paid More for Working on Holidays

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.

Moshkova and Ramirez, who are trying to form a union with the Communications Workers of America, have many more complaints about their job than not being paid fairly for working on holidays. Like many service workers, they have little control over their schedules. If they want a holiday off, or any day, they have to ask, and if it’s even approved—which is not a given—it might be scheduled as one of their regular two days off for that week, which are unpaid. At the same time, full-time workers may not be guaranteed 40 hours of work a week, leaving their paychecks unexpectedly short so they have to scramble to plug a hole in their budgets at the last minute. CWA surveyed workers and found that the median pay was just over $20 an hour, but some workers, like Spanish-language interpreters, start at just $15 an hour.

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 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.”