The Sick, Abjectly Horrible Office Holiday We Need to Abolish Now
Today is officially Boss’s Day, and workplaces all over the country are celebrating it—but they shouldn’t. In fact, they should pretend it doesn’t exist.
If you’re lucky enough to never have encountered Boss’s Day, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a holiday where employees are expected to express gratitude for their managers and employers. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s very much a thing in some offices—kind of like Administrative Professionals Day or any other day where a specialized profession is celebrated. The only difference is that this one is patently ridiculous, if not outright offensive.
It’s not that being a manager isn’t important, skilled work worth celebrating. It is! But being in charge already comes with plentiful rewards, many of them monetary. Most importantly, it comes with power dynamics that make it wildly inappropriate to pressure workers to celebrate their bosses. Employees should never feel pressure to spend their own money to pay for a gift to the person who determines if they get a paycheck or not, and yet, on Boss’s Day, that’s exactly what often happens.
Here are some accounts workers have sent me over the years about how their offices handle this highly suspect “holiday”:
Because of the power dynamics involved, a lot of workers don’t feel comfortable opting out:
To be fair, these “voluntary but not really” collections for the boss aren’t always driven by bosses themselves. Sometimes it’s a lower-level employee who pressures everyone else to participate:
In fact, some managers are horrified when they learn what’s going on:
But even managers who know what’s going on and feel uncomfortable with it don’t always know how they can stop it:
For the record, managers: You can put a stop to this! It’s not presumptuous to preemptively tell your team, “I see on the calendar that Boss’s Day is coming up. In case anyone worries they’re supposed to plan something for me, please do not! I should be celebrating you, not the other way around.”
Or there’s always the way this (excellent-sounding) manager handles it:
Hear that, bosses? Lunch is on you today.
