The Presidents Day Uprising

"Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence."

Vince Lombardi

The year was 1990.Presidents Day was celebrated on Monday February 19th.On the Friday before the holiday weekend,a delegation representing the women who worked in one department of my business asked for a minute of my time. Given that I always had an open door policy this was not out of the norm.

"Do we have Monday off?" the leader of this small group asked.

"No ...........why would we?" I replied.

"It's Presidents Day." she replied.

My response "If you can name the president, you can have the day off!"

When no reply came I responded"There ya go!".

This did not sit well with my employees.

Early Monday morning,well before our regular work start time 78 year old Amalia called . I could tell she was upset . I could not understand exactly what she was trying to say to me (Amalia only spoke spanish!).

I asked Maria the department supervisor to take the call and help me out.

It seems that the other women in the department had all decided that they would just take the day off. They knew we were very busy and that there was no way I could afford to fire them all. They had threatened bodily harm to Amalia if she came to work.

I told Maria to let Amalia know that everything would be fine and that she should wait until Wednesday to come back to work.

Upon returning to work on Tuesday, the women who had taken the day found the warehouse door padlocked shut.

I met them in the hallway and informed them that they were all fired.

Shocked they responded as if in one voice "you can't do that."

"I just did!" was my response.

I turned and went back to my office, waited until 8:30 when I knew the unemployment office would be open , and called to let them know that they would probably have 14 women coming in to file and exactly why I would be fighting any attempts for them to get benefits.

The manager at the office thanked me and said he would get back to me if she needed any more information.

The word of what happened that morning spread quickly around our industrial complex . I walked into the cafeteria and got more than my share of atta boys and way-to-go's from the other business owners. I don't think I paid for a cup of coffee for a month!

I scrambled to replace and then retrain a whole new crew,replacing my all Spanish speaking staff with a new all Polish speaking group.. Maria and Amalia were super stars when it came to getting our new labor force up to speed even with the obvious challenges of a language barrier.. Within a week we were back to almost full production again.

I never heard another word from the Unemployment office or my former employees.

Some called it the Presidents Day uprising.

I called it the Presidents Day Massacre.

30 years ago this week.