Upcoming National Holidays Largely Overlooked In Northeast Ohio

Upcoming National Holidays Largely Overlooked In Northeast Ohio

If you happen to have the day off on January 21, consider yourself lucky. Here in Northeast Ohio the percentage of organizations observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday has consistently fallen well below the national average and 2013 is no different. According to the 2013 ERC Paid Holiday Survey only 11% of the 202 participating organizations include Martin Luther King Jr. Day in their paid holiday allocation. This falls 21 percentage points below the national statistics recently reported by BNA.

Where the two surveys do see eye-to-eye, is in terms of the clear industry specific differences seen between the types of organizations that offer Martin Luther King Jr. Day and those that do not. For example, the BNA survey reports that manufacturers are by far the least likely to give the day off at 7% and non-business (i.e. non-profits/government) organizations are the most likely to give the day off at 56%. The ERC survey saw a similarly wide discrepancy between manufacturers and non-profit (i.e. non-business) with non-manufacturing employers falling somewhere in between the two extremes.

These industry specific variations are particularly noteworthy as they may be responsible for at least some of the discrepancy observed between the overall averages reported by the national and local surveys. In terms of the demographics represented by each survey sample, the national BNA survey included primarily non-manufacturing organizations, while over half of ERC’s local survey respondents represented manufacturing organizations. While this over-representation of manufacturers and non-profits in the local and national surveys, respectively, accounts for some of the discrepancy, the fact remains that Northeast Ohio employers are observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day at a lower rate than the national average.

Looking  ahead to February, President’s Day will be observed as a paid holiday by even fewer Northeast Ohio organizations, only 8%. Industry specific differences are slightly less prominent as the overall percentage of organizations offering the day off are lower, but a similar trend can be seen with manufacturers once again ranking last out of the three industry breakouts reported.

For more information on how many and which paid holidays Northeast Ohio employers are offering their employees in 2013, download the entire 2013 ERC Paid Holiday Survey free of charge.