By ROSE FRENCH, Associated Press WriterFri Aug 8, 5:16 PM ET
Union workers and officials at a Tyson Foods plant in Tennessee said Friday they have agreed to reinstate Labor Day as a paid holiday, and the plant will also observe the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr this year.
Tyson had previously agreed to drop Labor Day and substitute the Muslim holiday as part of a new 5-year contract to accommodate Muslim workers at the plant in Shelbyville, which is about 50 miles south of Nashville. The decision sparked widespread criticism, from local politicians to talk radio to the Internet.
The Springdale, Ark.-based company said it requested reinstating Labor Day after complaints from plant workers and the public.
Union members voted Thursday to reinstate Labor Day as one of the plant's paid holidays and keep Eid al-Fitr as an additional paid holiday for this year only. For the remainder of the contract, workers will have Labor Day and a personal holiday, which can be used to observe Eid al-Fitr or another day the employee's supervisor approves.
Union officials have said at least a couple hundred of the 1,200 plant workers are Muslim.
Eid al-Fitr — which falls on Oct. 1 this year — marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.
Muslim civil rights advocates criticized Tyson Foods, and a union official said the company's response was disingenuous.
"This wasn't something imposed. It seems that this backtracking would be the result of the backlash from anti-Muslim hate (Web) sites and Islamophobes on the Internet," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Washington D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the union headquartered in New York, said he was surprised by the reaction to the holiday change.
"I would have thought that people would have been more sensitive and sympathetic to the concern to the members community, who want to celebrate their religious faithof our ," he said. "It's a little disingenuous to say that they (Tyson) were responding to employee concerns. The proposal came from workers themselves."
Tyson's previous decision to drop Labor Day as a paid holiday drew intense scrutiny. In a letter to the Shelbyville Times-Gazette newspaper published Thursday, the local mayor and other state elected leaders said substituting Labor Day "for a nontraditional holiday is unacceptable."
"For over a hundred years, Labor Day has stood as a symbol to honor the working men and women of this country. But for the past few years traditions like Labor Day have been under attack. This time it's gone too far and we, as patriotic Americans, must draw our line in the sand," the letter said states.
Requests for workplace accommodations of Muslim religious obligations have become common around the country, say Muslim advocates.
In 2005, 30 workers walked off the job at a Dell Inc. plant in Nashville after alleging the company refused to let them pray at sunset.
Last year, dozens of Somali meatpacking workers at a Nebraska plant quit their jobs because they were not given enough time off for Muslim prayers, though they eventually returned to work at the Swift & Co. plant.
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