Articles Posted in Religion

Play us in Keith Richards…

Last month, the EEOC announced here that it had sued two companies, claiming that they violated federal law by failing to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs:

According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, Beverly R. Butcher, Jr. had worked as a general inside laborer at the companies’ mine in Mannington, W.V., for over 35 years when the mining companies required employees to use a newly installed biometric hand scanner to track employee time and attendance. Butcher repeatedly told mining officials that submitting to a biometric hand scanner violated his sincerely held religious beliefs as an Evangelical Christian. He also wrote the mining superintendent and human resources manager a letter explaining the relationship between hand-scanning technology and the Mark of the Beast and antichrist discussed in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament and requesting an exemption from the hand scanning based on his religious beliefs.

Sounds like someone’s taken a page out of the Lionel Hutz playbook.

Patrice Williams is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Seventh-Day Adventists believe that the Sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Because of her sincerely-held religious beliefs, Ms. Williams requested that her employer not require her to work during the Sabbath, to which the employer allowed her to do so through a combination of swapping shifts with co-workers, using vacations days, using sick days, scheduling doctors appointments, and other means.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVPG-jnehr0But, that wasn’t good enough for Ms. Williams. 

Bad Van Halen pun aside, let’s play some Skynyrd. Even Waldo agrees.

So, there was this woman in Louisiana who took a teaching position at an elementary school. You know the kind; one that operates on weekdays. And, around her start date, she asked the administration for Tuesdays off to pray and observe her Sabbath. And the administration was all like, no.

So, a month later, the teacher filed a Charge of Discrimination with the EEOC, claiming religious discrimination for failure to accommodate.

An employer must accommodate the sincerely-held religious beliefs of its employees unless the employer demonstrates that doing so would cause undue hardship for the business.

Undue hardship?!? What the heck is that? And how can you make sure that your managers are prepared to address — let alone spot — these issues when they arise.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down. I’ve got your back, after the jump…

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In anticipation of the current flu season, you decided to mandate that all employees get immunized. The problem is that one of your employees, a vegan, who won’t ingest any animal or animal by-products — especially not the microwaveable scrapple-wrapped tripe pops I keep in the lunchroom freezer — refuses to get a flu shot because it’s against her religious and philosophical beliefs.

What’s her religion, you ask? Why veganism, of course.

Yep, someone — represented by a licensed, practicing attorney — brought this lawsuit.

***Shakes head // Smiles // Kisses statuette of Blogga-Blogga, the goddess of HR blogging fodder. Love you, boo.***

Bagel party — whoop! whoop! — after the jump…

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They can’t all begin with a priest, minister and a rabbi walking into a bar. Then again, it’s “Religious Accommodation Tuesday” here at The Employer Handbook. So, after the jump, we’ll discuss the test to determine whether an employee may lawfully don religious items at work and find out whether the hospital worker in this case has a potential religious discrimination claim (Hint: he does).

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