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In August 2008, the Shelbyville, Tennessee, Times-Gazette reported that beginning in Fall 2008 workers at the local Tyson Foods' poultry processing plant would no longer have a paid day off on Labor Day but would instead be given a paid day off in conjunction with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. (The three-day Eid al-Fitr festival celebrates the end of the fasting Muslims observe during the preceding Islamic month of Ramadan.) An estimated 1,100 Somali refugees (most of them Muslims) live in the Shelbyville-Bedford County area, and according to Tyson's Director of Media Relations, Gary Mickelson, approximately 250 of the 1,200 workers currently employed at that Tyson Foods plant were Somalis. (A press release issued by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents workers at that Tyson plant, stated the plant had as many as 700 Muslim workers.) Tyson Foods issued a press release about the issue, which noted that the change in holidays applied only to a single processing plant and was accommodated as part of a union-initiated contract demand: Several days later, however, Tyson issued another press release announcing that the company had reached a new agreement with the union that reinstated Labor Day as a paid holiday and provided employees with a personal holiday which could be taken either for an employee's birthday or for Eid al-Fitr: Brian Mosely, the reporter who wrote the original article about this topic for the Times-Gazette, observed in a follow-up blog entry that the news about the holiday issue at Tyson's Shelbyville plant had quickly created quite a stir: Tyson Foods currently summarizes the issue on their web site with a notice informing readers that the issue was a brief and temporary one that occurred several years ago:
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