Religion at Work

Duddleston remembers a hospital cook who was a Seventh Day Adventist, and so could not work on Saturday. “The hospital said that she could swap shifts, but the only other cook she could find to take her shift was paid eight or nine cents an hour more than she was—less than a quarter,” he says. The hospital refused to pay the extra wages, but lost when the case went to court. The employer could have avoided the problem by paying the small difference in wages in the first place.

Missing a routine workday to perform routine religious obligations is one thing. Missing special company events is another, and some courts have ruled against workers who refused to attend a one-time company function that occurred on the employee’s Sabbath. Langevin recalls a financial company who employed an observant Messianic Jew, and asked that employee to attend the important retreat the company held one weekend a year. “This individual insisted that he could not come in and work on his Sabbath, and his spiritual leader backed him up,” Langevin says. “We said that we thought the company had the right to ask him to come in and to take action if he didn’t.” The resulting court case was settled. “It could have been different if this had been a high holy day, or if he had said that this is a very important observance for me personally,” Langevin says.

Employers are required to make reasonable accommodations, but they’re not required to let employees take unfair advantage. Duddleston has a client in the food preparation business who employs Muslims. The company wanted a place where these workers could pray, and built them a dedicated prayer room. “Everyone thought that was great,” Duddleston says. “Then they found out that some people were going to the prayer room and taking naps! So they took it out.”

Employers are also not required to forgo disciplinary measures when an employee takes an accommodation first and asks for it later. Another of Duddleston’s clients, a trucking company, hired a Jewish person who wanted to be home by sundown on Friday. The company said that supervisors couldn’t guarantee that this would happen, but that they would do their best. The company ultimately fired the driver for repeatedly leaving cargo unprotected or undelivered in order to go home on a Friday afternoon, all without discussing the situation with a supervisor first.

Duddleston urges employers to seek reasonable solutions even if the attempt isn’t required by law. “There’s no value in firing people—it’s a last resort, not a first resort,” he says. A client successfully dealt with a Christian worker who loudly praised Jesus at disruptive times, for instance, by calling the man’s minister. “They got the minister to give the guy the word that God didn’t want him to sing out at work,” Duddleston says.

A Respectful Workplace

It’s smart business to make sure that a workplace offers a respectful and comfortable atmosphere to people of different faiths. Religious organizations with employees who perform faith-based activities—a church and its minister, for example—can make religion a factor in hiring and firing. If that’s not your organization, don’t take religion into account when you hire, fire, review, and promote. That’s true even if you suspect that a qualified candidate’s religious expressions—a Sikh who wears a turban, for instance—will take some getting used to on the part of coworkers and clients.