The labor union at a Tyson Foods poultry plant in Tennessee has successfully negotiated a contract replacing Labor Day with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, but criticism of the switch has now prompted the company to reinstate Labor Day – while also allowing Muslim employees to observe Eid al-Fitr as a personal holiday.

The plant affected is in the town of Shelbyville, located 40 miles south of Nashville. Under a five-year contract there, Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, has become one of the plant’s eight paid holidays.

The provision, which was proposed by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has pleased the plant’s Somali workers who account for what Tyson estimates as 250 and what the union believes is as many as 700 of the plant’s 1,200 employees. But the provision, which was negotiated last year and approved by workers in November, has outraged many outsiders who expressed their complaints in letters to the union’s President Stuart Appelbaum.

“You are a union that is proud of achieving a Muslim Holiday and prayer room?” one person wrote. “A union in the United States, a country based on Christianity? You call yourselves Americans? Have you forgotten 9/11?” Another letter read, “You had no right to drop Labor Day. Muslim employees must integrate Labor Day into THEIR lives if they are going to live in America.”

But Appelbaum said the decision was fully consistent with the spirit of Labor Day. “We in the labor movement have always understood that unions are only strong when we work to protect the dignity of all faiths, and that includes Muslims,” said Appelbaum, who also serves as president of the Jewish Labor Committee. “What we negotiated was the will of the workers,” said Appelbaum, who added that his was the first union to negotiate a paid day off for a Muslim holiday and that he was sure Tyson would not be the last employer to agree.

The union agreed to the holiday swap in part because Tyson has usually required the plant’s employees to work on Labor Day anyway, with employees receiving a holiday premium for working that day. “We had worked 23 Labor Days in a row; it wasn’t like it was a day to spend with our family,” said Randy Hadley, a union representative who helped negotiate the contract.

Hadley pointed out that last year the plant was almost shut down on Eid al-Fitr because nearly all of the Somali workers took off work that day. Hadley said management was “elated” by the proposal to make Eid al-Fitr a holiday. Many conservative and anti-immigrant commentators, however, are anything but elated and have publicly criticized Tyson and called for a boycott of its products. Last Monday, Tyson issued a statement saying, “Contrary to recent reports, Labor Day is still a holiday at Tyson Foods. The issue concerns only the plant at Shelbyville. This is not a religious accommodation,” the statement added. “Rather, it is a union-initiated contract demand.”

But after receiving criticism for the switch from employees and potential consumers, Tyson’s corporate headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas, last Friday announced the company would reinstate Labor Day as an added holiday. Both the company and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union say there will be nine paid holidays in 2009 – one more than in the past – including both Labor Day and Eid al-Fitr.

Union members approved the new agreement on a vote held last Thursday. For the remainder of the five-year contract, there will be eight paid holidays, including Labor Day and a personal holiday that can be used to observe Eid al-Fitr or another day the employee’s supervisor approves. Muslim civil rights activists now say Tyson is backtracking on the initial agreement in the face of intense public criticism.

Local political leaders have called on Tyson and the union to reconsider the contract. In a letter to the Shelbyville Times-Gazette, the mayor and other state elected leaders said substituting Labor Day “for a nontraditional holiday is unacceptable,” adding, “For over a hundred years, Labor Day has stood as a symbol to honor the working men and women of this country. But for the past few years traditions like Labor Day have been under attack. This time it’s gone too far and we, as patriotic Americans, must draw a line in the sand,” the letter said.

But Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Washington, D.C.-based Council on American Islamic Relations, said the initial holiday changes “were negotiated in a labor contract, which seems to be the essence of having a Labor Day in the first place. “This wasn’t something imposed. It seems that this backtracking would be the result of the backlash from anti- Muslim hate [web]sites and Islam-o-phobes on the Internet.”

In a news release issued last Friday, Tyson said the company made the change to the original deal because of both public and employee concern. Appelbaum, the union president, expressed his surprise at the reaction to the Eid al-Fitr holiday.

“I would have thought that people would have been more sensitive and sympathetic to the concern to the members of our community, who want to celebrate their religious faith. We had told them [Tyson] from the get-go that we wanted Eid al-Fitr as an additional holiday. They would only do it in exchange for Labor Day. We were not asking to give up anything. So it’s a little disingenuous to say they [Tyson] were responding to employee concerns.”