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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.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
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.
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.
This is why you don’t ask.
Also, you don’t really need a whole day. I’m also Canadian. Employers are required to allow you time to do it, not an entire day.
I would phrase the question like this: “I need to take time to go vote. Would you prefer I take the morning or afternoon off?”
If they so no to both, you say “you know it’s illegal not to allow me time off to vote, right?”
I’ve changed careers since the last election, but as a driver I’d just say “I’m going to swing by the polling place in my way to or back from wherever” and it was never a problem.
It really depends on how much you need that job to like
Not be homeless
And how hard it was to get the job in the first place.
You can make your legal rights count if you have options.
If you don’t, you let your boss walk all over you and thank them for it.
I mean you do have options. We have the labour board here in Canada.
You don’t tell your employer you’re talking to them. You let them contact the employer. They can’t fire you while an investigation is ongoing.
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.
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 can’t tell me you don’t understand why this is
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.
In France elections are held on a Sunday so most people don’t work, the others are allowed time off to vote of course
Well in the US, no one was originally intended to vote but the male landed gentry, who clearly could afford to travel for several days to their polling place, get plastered on local liquor, and just shout who they were voting for at whomever was supposed to jot that down. Them that person would go off and vote for whoever they wanted, in case the peasants had gotten any silly ideas and voted for the wrong guy.
I think what you just described is the electoral college
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
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
What? Don’t you get like 16 hours to vote on polling day?
We have elections on Thursdays in the UK and no one claims not having the whole day off is “voter supression” because you’ve got plenty of time to vote and it only takes five minutes.
and it only takes five minutes.
Not here it doesn’t. There are constant intentional efforts to shut down polling locations in communities with a disproportionate amount of minorities. The intent is to force minority voters to travel further to get to a polling place (which may not be an option due to our joke of a public transit network), and to force them to wait in line for hours at a time to vote.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/04/upshot/voting-wait-times.html
In some jurisdictions, they’ve gone so far with their voter suppression tactics that they make it a punishable offense to provide food and water for those waiting in the hours long lines to vote.
And that’s all before accounting for the fact that many people need to have two jobs to be stable, which makes it hard to get to the polls even if the lines are short.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/8-7-million-americans-now-193011733.html
The U.S. election system is a joke, and a sham democracy.
The U.S.
election systemis a joke, and a sham democracy.FTFY
That’s fair
it only takes five minutes
Sure, if I park on the sidewalk and skip everyone waiting in line. It actually takes less than 5 minutes.
Everything about your comment is wrong. No we don’t get guaranteed time off of any kind but even if we did, the amount of time it takes varies wildly.
They are saying that you have all day to vote, not that you get 16 hours of time off.
I see. Well, still, polling centers may not be open or accessible 24/7. What people outside the US don’t get is that we have federal state and local laws so you can rarely say anything is true across the country.
Not to mention that people work long or double shifts sometimes.
Voting on election day can take way more than five minutes, however, in most cases, you have weeks to vote.
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)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.
