Georgia’s Largest Hospital System Drops Christmas Eve as Paid Holiday, Adds Juneteenth
All in the name of equity.
Emory Healthcare, the largest hospital system in Georgia, added Juneteenth as a paid holiday but erased Christmas Eve from the calendar:
Employees will now have to use paid time off to celebrate the December holiday.
The change, announced August 31, will also let employees earn extra holiday pay for working on Juneteenth—but not on Christmas Eve.
“We hope this will allow more opportunities for celebration, reflection, and education,” Emory Healthcare CEO Joon Sup Lee wrote in an email to employees. “[D]iversity, equity, and inclusion at Emory Healthcare (EHC) is about creating an environment of true belonging for our patients and team members, while ensuring equitable outcomes for all.”
The move came after Emory Healthcare solicited feedback on its holiday schedule, according to the email, which notes that patients can’t make clinical appointments on paid holidays. That policy appears to have fueled a zero-sum dynamic in which adding one holiday meant axing another.
“To minimize impact to patient care,” Lee said, “we will not be adding another paid holiday to our calendars. Rather, beginning January 2024, we will remove Christmas Eve from our holiday calendar and replace it with Juneteenth.”
The change even confused NAACP DeKalb County President Edwina Clanton:
“I don’t understand, why they can’t do both,” asked NAACP DeKalb County President Edwina Clanton.
Clanton believes companies should recognize Juneteenth, which became a federal holiday in 2021. However, she said the move by Emory could be more harmful than good – at least initially
“I’m sure it will put anger in some hearts,” Clanton added. “Why do we have to do this? Why can’t we have our old holidays off? Some more consideration, even asking the employees which days you want to give up, that may have worked better.”
The move came after EHC solicited feedback on its holiday schedule, according to the email, which notes that patients can’t make clinical appointments on paid holidays. That policy appears to have fueled a zero-sum dynamic in which adding one holiday meant axing another.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) September 7, 2023
Not everyone is happy about the new schedule. Hospital employees told Atlanta News First that the change would pit Christians and African Americans against each other—and Edwina Clanton, the president of the NAACP chapter in Emory’s county, warned of anti-black backlash.
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) September 7, 2023
In Chicago alone, gunfire over the three-day weekend killed 13 people this year.
Lee did not respond to a request for comment.https://t.co/FqUtbfPYfq
— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) September 7, 2023
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Comments
Biden Pander Holiday
GOP went along with this silly federal holiday too. They wouldn’t want other people to say bad things about them!
The GOP are invertebrates.
So, which uber-blue marxist city will be the first to ban Christmas lights because ‘global warming?’
It’s coming.
Most cities don’t have ‘Christmas Lights’ anymore. They have ‘Holiday Lights.’ In the eight years of the Obama presidency, not once did the White House Christmas Card say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Not once. I suspect in the very foreseeable future, there will no longer be a ‘National Christmas Tree,’ likely replaced by a National Holiday Tree.
Time to dig out the old Soviet season’s greetings….. “With New Year”…..
Correct. Municipal Christmas lights. But I was referring to cities banning your personal home decorations with their carbon foot print, fossil fuel burning, light pollution, climate changing Christmas lights.
It’s coming.
Lol. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that. You’re right. That’s probably coming sooner rather than later.
When it happens, that should make for an interesting Supreme Court decision on freedom of religion.
They should do like Chicago did: tell the thugs to please wait until Christmas Eve to shoot all the rivals they would otherwise have shot on Juneteenth. I’m sure they’ll cooperate.
Boycott the hospital, it’s that simple.
“We hope this will allow more opportunities for celebration, reflection, and education,” Emory Healthcare CEO Joon Sup Lee wrote in an email to employees.
Thanks, Joon Sup Lee! So nice to have Joon Sup Lee define for us Christians who built a Christian state what our National Holidays are!
I can’t wait to emigrate to China, raise a half-chinese child to prominence and single-handedly forbid Vesak and Bodhi Day.
I hope their black employees don’t mind working on Christmas Eve.
Or on MLK day.
Who would have thought Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”…. is racist now? And to think that Christmas is a “white” holiday? Georgia is now leaning Black Marxist I guess. Emory is woke medicine now… respond appropriately.
But Christmas isn’t the issue here. The affected “holiday” is Christmas EVE. When did that become a holiday?
when families wanted to be together to have those celebrations together. Moms helping the kids get a plate of cookies ready, Dads tucking them in “with care, in hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there.” Growing up, my family Christmas party was Christmas Eve at my grandparents house – cousins, aunts, uncles…..
Yup. We always did Christmas on Christmas Eve. Good thing, too, since I was not then and am not now a morning person. Now that I’m officially a “senior citizen,” I still miss the big family Christmas Eve celebrations. Since everyone has their own families now, we get together Christmas day so everyone with kids can do their own thing.
Because of unions.
“The new schedule could also leave the hospital short-staffed at one of the deadliest times of the year: Since 2021, Juneteenth weekends have been marred by mass shootings and other forms of gun violence, including at holiday celebrations across the country”.
A holiday full of love and bliss
Can’t make this sh!t up
I think we need to trade in Christmas Day for Kwanzaa, or maybe Columbus Day for George Floyd’s birthday, October 14.
After 20 years of service, we got 10 days of sickleave, 20 days of vacation, and every employee got 12+/- paid holidays. The lesser holidays weren’t observed, rather they were ‘banked’ to be used at winter break (12/24-12/31). I don’t recall any company bulletins referring to Christmas, rather the Holidays.
There was talk after I departed, for the sake of equal representation in a more ‘diverse’ workforce, of letting each employee specify in an annual personal performance agreement of allocating 10 days that the employee could select in keeping with their beliefs / needs. It did amuse me how the most rabid atheist / agnostic did not object to paid leave on Christmas and whined at the proposal to turn it into an ordinary work day.
I would be offended to take “Juneteenth” off at the expense of a holiday I felt obligated to observe. But I get it – they’re trying to staff a production operation and can’t operate at a reduced workforce all the time. 42 paid days off plus weekends is a lot of down time for a place of business. Toss in a couple weeks of jury duty and your effectively looking at a 4 day work week – or 5 months off work per year.
They want a work schedule like their President…Joe Biden has. All vacation, and no work.
Jill must have downvoted me. (who knew she was a commenter here??) Who else is proud of the vacation schedule of the installed president??
There’s one or two ‘very sensitive’ readers here who regularly down vote me. I think it’s jealousy of my amazing thumbnail and clickable username. What’s not to love, right? 😉
Dropped Christian holiday for a Cultural Marxist Day
Lazy grammar Cultural Marxist Day
I assume that Emory Hospital treats “Kwanzaa” as a paid holiday, too.
So, does this leave black Christian with nowhere to go?
Any chance Joon will replace MLK Day with Candlemas Day?
What a sad joke this holiday is! It celebrates the Emancipation Proclamation which was an executive order ending slavery in the Confederate States ONLY! Lincoln had no legal authority over the Confederate States, but he did have that authority over the Union States which he did not exercise – He purposely allowed slavery to remain legal in the six Union States! But who cares about real history.
It doesn’t even celebrate the emancipation proclamation, but only the day 2-1/2 years later that it was finally enforced in Galveston, Texas – and only in Galveston. But some people seem to think that General Gordon Granger’s words magically spread far beyond the reach of his troops.
And no, Lincoln did NOT have the power to ban slavery in the states that remained loyal to the Union. He was the commander in chief and did have the power to determine what the US Army would do with enemy property,
All eyewash. The Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves, but made Old Honest Abe look good. Possibly the origination of “virtue signalling”?
humans born with DRD4 liberal gene DNA ruin everything they touch…these are genetically identifiable people
That’s a rabbit hole I didn’t know about. I’ve got plenty of curiosity, but few would call me politically liberal. This website perhaps puts a nice spin on it, anyway I don’t know if I have “the gene” or not.
https://www.drd4.us/
I like it b/c it brings the consequences front and center. Life is about choices/trade offs, nothing is for free or without an impact and every decision has consequences. For far too long our society has been under the spell of ‘you can have it all’ or ‘our Nation is rich enough to do X or worse do X, Y and Z’ without any realistic assessment of the impacts of those decisions. Bring the pain.
Juneteenth is a bullshit made-up holiday just like Kwanza.
It is. Minor commemoration in Texas. That’s it.
But. Dems. Want it all.
And both are used as bludgeons for various things like paid holidays.
Black Marxists kicking Black Christians to the curb like a wet food stamp.
Have fun working on Christmas Eve, chumps!
So DEI is doing what it is designed to do.
Christmas eve off?
Where?
If the market’s open, we’re open.
Exactly! I am a retired state employee, and we got a whole bunch of paid holidays… but Christmas Eve was NOT part of any holiday discussion. (I do recall a big push for getting the day after Thanksgiving off, though – and they may gave gotten that one after I retired.)
Georgia is thoroughly cucked on issues of race. “White guilt” among people with no guilt runs rampant there.
Pretty sure, Juneteenth was a non event for the local black folk in Atlanta, General Sherman having told them earlier, all about their coverage under the Emancipation Proclamation. Sherman was on his way to the beach…
Well, I wrote an explanation of what Juneteenth actually was and how what the hospital wants to celebrate happened in Georgia a couple of months before what the holiday and date really commemorates happened here in the West, But for some reason it went awa’ w’ t’a fairies. So, I will just toss in an agreement with oldvet50 and another bit of Civil War trivia.
Ulysses and Julia Grant owned a couple of slaves [they were Julia’s originally], because they remained legal in those non-seceding states where they were legal before even after the Emancipation Proclamation. They remained legal until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December 1865. While Ulysses commanded the Union Army that broke the Confederacy, the slaves rotated being with him acting as his personal attendants. The war was over a lot more than the institution of slavery, which deserved to die. It was over the very nature of our government.
Subotai Bahadur
And just LISTEN to those frackin’ leftist HYPOCRITES whine if ANY large public system of any kind EVER took away Christmas Eve as a “Holiday”?!
I live in Texas, the very home of Juneteenth—we’ve been celebrating it for years, but never with the same pandering as this! This is vulgar and crass.
Let’s do one further—refuse Muslims any time off for Ramadan. Imagine the violence over that one!