Good Friday–Why is it a Financial Holiday?

Have you ever noticed how many public holidays there are in the European Union? They total about fifteen days that are in common among all the member countries. In addition, each country claims an array of other days off to celebrate national events. And in Europe, when the Government is closed for a day, so are most other businesses.

It’s interesting to observe how many of those European “holidays” are really “holy days” – that is, derived from Christian (yes, all of them are Christian) religious events, celebrating the mysteries of the faith or the feast days of popular saints.

Here in the U.S., the federal government grants us a paltry eleven holidays, but most of the states soften the blow a bit with their own selection of local days off. For example, in Massachusetts (where I hail from) they celebrate Patriots Day – in commemoration of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the Revolutionary War. Glancing through the list of states, I was fascinated to see that Texas – a place that symbolizes rugged individualism over government regulations – proudly has a total of ten state holidays.
That brings me to the point of this column. There is one holiday in the U.S. that is neither federal nor state nor municipal. Nor is it a bank holiday.

Still guessing? It’s Good Friday. That most somber of Christian “holy days” is a holiday in the world of finance. Moreover, that has been the case in this country for at least 175 years, since records were first kept in 1846. Why, you might ask, and rightly so.

I pondered this dilemma for years and eventually created my own theory. Back in the nineteenth century, the owners of brokerage firms were mostly white Protestant men, and by the twentieth century, they shared that ownership position with financially savvy Jewish immigrants who established their own competitive firms – not a crowd one would expect to see in church on Good Friday.

But there’s another side to the history of the brokerage business, and therein lies the answer to my query.
Before the era of electronic trading, every brokerage firm office had what was called a “cage”, a secured area where clerks would receive and distribute shares of stock that the brokers bought and sold for their clients. If someone worked “in the cage”, it meant he was part of that back-office team. While the high-powered jobs were held by educated and wealthy men, the cage was run by the less educated and certainly less wealthy. Who exactly were those men in the cage?

During the mid-19th century, that kind of back-office work required basic literacy and language skills, but not significant education. The ideal source of labor came from the waves of Irish immigrants who spoke English and many of whom, while poor and unskilled, had been educated in Ireland. Nearly all were Roman Catholic.

To a man, they knew that on Good Friday it was their duty to God to be in Church from noon until three pm, to commemorate the time that Christ hung on the cross. I can almost hear them telling their manager that they would have to be out for three hours and their manager, himself a good Irish Catholic who had worked his way up the ladder as supervisor, was not one to refuse them.

So, it was left to him to relay to the partners at the top of the firm that all employees who worked in the cage would be at church for three hours during the height of the trading day. What were the partners to do? Fire all those employees? That was no solution – it would leave them finding replacements, most likely more of the same Catholic Irishmen. So, the big shots – the WASP and the Jewish partners - had no choice but to capitulate.

In the world of business, it’s wonderful to see the little guys win, particularly when it’s a matter of conscience.