Uber will honor Juneteenth and elections days around the world as company holidays, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced Wednesday.
“To embrace the meaning of #Juneteenth this year, we’re making it a paid day off. We encourage employees to spend it in a way that allows them to stand up against racism, whether that’s by learning, participating in a community action, or reflecting on how to make change,” Khosrowshahi said on Twitter.
“But I strongly believe that lasting change really happens at the ballot box. That’s why we are making election days around the world an @Uber company holiday from now on,” he added.
In the United States, Election Day takes place on a Tuesday in November, making it difficult for some people to get to the ballot box because they have to work.
Uber’s announcement is the latest effort among tech companies to support and honor the Black community. Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey announced last week that Juneteenth would become a company holiday.
Juneteenth celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. A combination of the words June and nineteenth, the holiday commemorates when an U.S. army general informed enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865 that the Civil War had ended and they were free.
The Confederate army had surrendered two months earlier in April and President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation more than two years prior, but the abolition of slavery was not enforced in remote Texas until much later.
— CNBC