Foreign Policy Blogs

Prayer Disputes in the United States

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal looks at how the American workplace accommodates religious differences. Phred Dvorak specifically addresses events in Colorado and Nebraska last month when meatpacking plants "fired about 200 Muslim Somali workers who walked off the job over prayer disputes." Dvorak writes that the United States is seeing is a "surge in workplace disputes over religion," with claims of religious discrimination doubling over the past 15 years and a 15% increase in 2007. There were 4,515 claims of religious discrimination filed with federal, state, and local agencies last year. The number of claims related to religion is also growing faster than claims based on race or gender. The article quotes Reed Russell, counsel for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who says that this increase "reflects greater religious diversity and openness about faith in the workplace." The rule generally appears to be that the employers are supposed to accommodate religious requests by employees if they don't pose any "undue hardship" on operations. In reality, the tensions at the meatpacking plants are often disputes , not with the management or employer , but the result of perceptions from coworkers of different religions. For example, immigrant workers from South America have been walking out as well , arguing that the Somali prayer requests have meant "their complaints had gotten a special hearing." As far as the religion is concerned, Muslim prayers typically take less than five minutes but the timing of the prayers vary each day with the sunrise and sunset. Therefore, prayer breaks would have to be expressly timed for each day, which could in face disrupt assembly line work. Back during Ramadan, the disputes were particularly sensitive because the workers were fasting and the break time was needed both for praying and breaking the fast. The Omaha World Herald back in September (during Ramadan) looked at the problems both in Grand Island Nebraska and the JBS Swift & Co plant in Colorado. As Christopher Burbach has accurately written for the Omaha paper: "The controversy is a complicated on involving religion, culture clashes, refugee resettlement, immigration, union contracts and factory demands in an increasingly diverse American work force."

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Picture Source: The Independent

 

 

Author

Karin Esposito

Karin Esposito is blogging on religion and politics from her base in Central Asia. Currently, she is the Project Manager for the Tajikistan Dialogue Project in Dushanbe. The Project is run through the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies with the support of PDIV of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The aim of the project is to establish practical mechanisms for co-existence and peaceful conflict resolution between Islamic and secular representatives in Tajikistan. After receiving a Juris Doctorate from Boston University School of Law in 2007, she worked in Tajikistan for the Bureau of Human Rights and later as a Visting Professor of Politics and Law at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP). Ms. Esposito also holds a Master's in Contemporary Iranian Politics (2007) from the School of International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Iran and a Master's in International Relations (2003) from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (GIIDS) in Switzerland.

Areas of Focus:
Islam; Christianity; Secularism;

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