A reader writes:

With the holidays coming up, things are getting tense in my office. There’s a divide between my coworkers who are parents and my coworkers who don’t have kids.

I’m an associate director of a small public service office, and we are open on the holidays. Full stop, no exceptions, we are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. We’re a small office so when we hire staff, they are credentialed professionals in the field who know that we don’t turn our lights off. We do a lottery to fairly pick holiday coverage with the caveat that if you work Thanksgiving, you’re not in the lottery for Christmas, and if you work Christmas one year, you’re exempt the next year.

It used to work. But the last several years, the staff with kids started getting vocal about having plans and calling the lottery unfair as early as September.

Last year I worked Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve and Day since the staff picked in the lottery all called out, leaving a huge coverage gap. Several of the staff also have just started refusing to come in on holidays, period, showing our administration hotels and flights they already booked. This is wearing down the morale of those of us staff without kids or spouses. We’re usually run ragged after working low-staffed weekend shifts, which are also shifts the parent staffers are starting to grumble about. About 90% of the time, as the associate director, what I say goes. But there are two more managers above my head who the parent staffers frequently use to override me on this issue. I get the same joking tones from my bosses — “Oh, don’t be heartless, they have kids!”

I may not have kids, but I do have a wife and parents and friends who I would love to see, and so do my childless staffers, I’m sure. I don’t know where to go from here to keep morale up, but also inject a little more professionalism and fairness into the mix while maybe getting to eat some turkey myself this year.

Yeah, that’s not okay. You can’t make decisions about who gets prized time off based on who has children and who doesn’t. That’s incredibly unfair, and it’s guaranteed to drive off your employees without kids.

The system you have in place to handle this is a reasonable one — except you have some staff members who are flagrantly choosing not to abide by it.

Refusing to come in during scheduled shifts is a huge problem. I don’t throw around the word “insubordination” lightly (and I generally think it’s a pretty silly word), but this is that. You can’t run a business if people are going to decide they won’t follow your fair and transparent system for time off and instead will unilaterally decide to stick their colleagues with their share of the work.

How willing are you to enforce this system? When people come to you and say they’ve already booked travel reservations for those days, are you willing to hold firm and say no, since they knew the system and took that risk with full knowledge that they might be scheduled to work then? Are you willing to require them to come in anyway? I don’t think there’s any way to make this system work if you’re not willing to do that — since you’ll essentially be saying “we hope you’ll do this but we won’t require it.” And then it’s likely to quickly spread to others, and you’re going to have even more of a problem than you have now. So if this is your system, you need to hold people to it.

And that sucks! No one wants to tell someone that they need to cancel holiday plans with their family. But realize that if you don’t tell them that, then you’re by default saying it to someone else — because someone else is going to get pulled in to cover for them. So I think you’ve got to commit to it.

But of course to do that, you need to ensure that the two managers above you aren’t undermining the system. So talk to them and point out that making work assignments based on who does and doesn’t have kids is really gross and unfair and is going to drive away good employees. You might also point out that if they really want to award time based on family connections, they’ll also need to also consider things like who has dying relatives … and then they’re getting even further into inappropriate territory. You should also point out that if they keep letting people opt out of the system, more and more people are likely to take advantage of that. Ask them, “Are you really proposing that we just assign holiday coverage to people without kids? If you keep doing this, that’s where we’ll end up and that’s really unethical and unfair. Are you willing to tell our employees without kids that that’s the policy here?”

You can also choose to put your foot down and refuse to do the coverage yourself, and refuse to assign it to staffers who already took their turn. Some battles are worth fighting, and this would be a fine one to take a stand on if you’re willing to push it.

That said, there might be other things you can do to make this go more smoothly. Are you able to offer better incentives to people who work on holidays? For example, can you pay them a premium for those days or reward them with extra time off that other people don’t get? If you make the incentives attractive enough, you might even get people volunteering for some of those days.

It also might be worth sitting down with your team and asking for people’s input on how to make this work (making it clear from the start that “someone other than parents does it” isn’t going to be entertained). It’s possible that by involving people in trying to figure out how to solve the problem, they’ll be more bought into whatever solution you land on (even if it’s just “enforce the current system”) or at least will feel less able to openly flout it.