I just saw a discussion among corporate event planners where one person was upset that event organizers don’t give proper consideration to scheduling over top of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
I can appreciate the annoyance, when I was still a practicing Christian I would never think to schedule a work thing over Easter or Christmas. We should treat others with consideration, and should be mindful of what others view as important days. But I also don’t know what each religion considers to be major, non negotiable holidays. Do you?
Another question, does it matter where the event is? (for example, in the US should less consideration be given to holidays of religions that have fewer adherents?)
Accommodating the holidays of every single religion being followed would be pretty difficult given the number of them as well as some religions don’t follow the Gregorian calendar (such as Islam). Western society and events are based largely on Christian holidays. A lot of workplaces, especially unionized ones, give an x amount of days off to use for religious holidays. It seems to be an effective method to help accommodate those who are Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist/etc.
As for keeping things going on at work in spite of everyone’s religious holidays…It’s your responsibility to let your manager know when these dates are coming up and book them off. It’s your managers responsibility to ensure work doesn’t get affected by this.
In fact no religion follows the Gregorian calendar, since that was invented by Pope Gregory in the XVI century, and by that time all of the major religions were already there. Christians migrated to the Gregorian calendar, but not everything, which is why Easter (which is also a Jewish holiday) keeps moving around on Gregorian dates.