This story had been going around the blogosphere and the wire services for the past few days. Tyson Foods, in contract negotiations with the local union, have agreed to not make Labor Day a paid holiday and switch it with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
According to Snopes, the change would only affect one plant out of 110 that Tyson owns -- the one in Shelbyville, KY. The plant has 700 Muslims working at that plant out of its 1,200 employees. All other plants will have Labor Day as a paid holiday.
It's primarily a local situation because of the influx of Somali refugees that have been coming into Kentucky over the past few years, but it still has some riled up because of the preference of one religion over another. And with others, it's a matter of people believing that the Kentucky plant has become "dhimmi" in order to satisfy the Muslims working there.
My feeling on this is that the plant should have told the union that they are not the only religion practiced at the plant and that they needed to have some more reasonable demands. The people at Tyson should have known that this would cause a big stir once it got out there, so now the genie is out of the bottle. You can't put it back in, and you can't take it back.
If Tyson was primarily a Muslim company, I could see doing this. But it's not, it's an American company. So it needs to be sensitive to the needs of Americans, not those just coming here.
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