Prayer Breaks Present Difficult Religious Accommodation Issue
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Steven T. Collis
Recent news stories describe the tension between Muslim workers seeking multiple prayer breaks at specified times during their workday and employers who need those workers on their assembly lines. Many Muslim employees, including some in Colorado, have walked off the job, claiming their prayer requests have been unlawfully denied. With religious accommodations cases in the news, let’s look at how to handle these tricky situations.
Case In Point
The Muslim faith requires five daily prayers at specific times of the day, such as pre-dawn and sunset. Ariens Company, a manufacturer of lawn mowers and snowblowers, previously had allowed 53 Somali immigrant Muslim production workers to leave their work stations to pray at times required by their faith. In recent months, however, Ariens decided not to accommodate special prayer breaks, requiring instead that workers only leave their assembly-line positions during their two 10-minute breaks per shift. Although Ariens provides prayer rooms that the Muslim employees may use for their daily prayers, it says it costs too much in lost productivity to shut down an assembly line for unscheduled prayer breaks.
In January of this year, the Muslim employees walked off their jobs to protest Ariens’ policy which they say forces them to choose between their religion and their jobs. By February, many had returned to work but seven were fired for continuing to take unscheduled prayer breaks and 14 resigned because of the policy.
The issue has attracted the attention of the news media as well as advocacy groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group planned to file a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging that Ariens failed to reasonably accommodate the Somali Muslim workers’ religious beliefs.
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/prayer-breaks-present-difficult-religious-accommodation-issue
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