This past Christmas, Yuliia Moshkova had to hurry to open presents with her family before her work shift started at 8 a.m. She works from her home in Louisiana as a Russian-to-English interpreter for LanguageLine Solutions, a call-in translation service that contracts with companies around the United States. When Moshkova’s shift was over at 4:30 p.m., she rushed to cook a Christmas meal. “It’s pretty hard to cook something for your family,” when you’ve worked all day, Moshkova said. “It doesn’t feel like a normal holiday when family can’t spend time together.”
Many of LanguageLine’s clients are hospitals, insurance companies, and similar services that deal with emergencies, so someone has to work on holidays—and there’s always a need for translation for non-English speakers. Unlike many other Americans, however, the workers at LanguageLine say they don’t receive holiday pay to compensate them for their work on federal holidays. For Moshkova and her co-workers, this was a surprise when they first started working there. “I’ve been working since I was 16 years old,” said Sara Ramirez, who works as a Spanish-English interpreter for LanguageLine in Texas. “And this is the first company that I’ve ever worked with that did not honor holidays or at least offer some kind of compensation if you were forced to work the holiday.”
That’s because they don’t have to. The federal government recognizes 11 holidays, and most government workers and private-sector employees either get those days off or are compensated extra for being asked to work on a day normally spent with family and friends. Most Americans feel entitled to time off for a Fourth of July picnic or an occasional long weekend, never mind the big holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. But federal law doesn’t require companies to provide those days off or to pay employees more for working then. It is another way that some of the most vulnerable workers in the U.S. can be exploited and undervalued.
This week, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego introduced the Holiday Pay Act to require companies to pay time and a half to employees who work federal holidays. “Many Americans are working holidays because they need the money and giving up precious time with family and loved ones to do so,” Gallego said in a statement. “They deserve to be fairly compensated for their sacrifice.”
Gallego has also introduced a separate bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $20 an hour. These efforts, though they won’t advance under Republican control, are needed more than ever. President Donald Trump’s second administration has already caused massive harm to working Americans with cuts to food assistance, health care subsidies, and other benefits, while implementing tariffs and economic policies that are causing the affordability crisis to spiral out of control. Meanwhile, the wealthiest just get richer.
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.”
On top of their own emergencies, the LanguageLine workers are often dealing with other people’s emergencies, as well. “I don’t think a lot of these people who made the policies have ever done the job that we do,” Ramirez said. “Do you know how hard it is to jump from one language to the other, from one industry to the other, at the drop of a hat? How am I going from a medical call with all this medical terminology, and the next call, I’m in a courtroom with a whole other set of terminology, and then from there, I jump to an insurance call?”
(In response to questions, LanguageLine said that it employs full-, part-time, and contract workers around the world, while it also uses workers employed through partner agencies. Workers can request time off in advance and can take unscheduled health breaks of up to five minutes offline, in addition to regular lunch and 15-minute breaks for every four hours of work.)
The women said they’re supposed to have 15 seconds between calls but often they don’t even get that, and the next call is waiting for them by the time they click off the last one. When that happens, the person who has been waiting for them is already upset that they’ve been on hold. “If my last call was telling somebody that their loved one died, do you know what that does to us emotionally? All I’m asking is to be treated like a human being and not a robot,” Ramirez said.
American workers want to be treated like a human and not a robot. They want their time and energy and effort to be properly valued. They want corporations to understand that their skills can’t be replaced easily with technology. And they want a party that fights for that, loudly and without hesitation. Asking the federal government to compel companies to recognize national holidays is a small part of that, but it would mean a lot to many millions of workers.
