Twenty-five former employees of the Hertz Rental Car company, who are Somalia immigrants and adherents of Islam, have filed a religious discrimination lawsuit. Their claim, they were terminated on the premise of their religious belief to pray. According to the Seattle Times, on December 7, 2011 and then today by Reuters, this lawsuit purports that these Muslim workers were denied the ability to practice their religious belief and that Hertz created a hostile work environment.
According to Federal Regulations, and the Equal Employment Opportunity, a company is not able to discriminate against a person’s religious belief system in consideration of potential employment, promotion, or other work related issues:
Executive Order 11246, as amended, prohibits job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment.
The Seattle Times and Reuters also state that the lawsuit was filed on Wednesday, December 7, 2011 in King County Superior Court, and the request is for reinstatement and reimbursement of lost benefits and attorneys’ fees.
Reuters provides this detail in their article – Hertz fight Muslim workers’ suit over prayer breaks:
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in King County Superior Court, accuses Hertz of intentionally creating a “hostile work environment owing to religious, race and national origin discrimination” by terminating the drivers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in late October.
According to both articles, the lawsuit stems from Hertz discharging those twenty-five employees who took longer than the normal allotted ten-minute breaks, and refused to clock out and then back in to establish that they had taken their ten-minute break. The workers are union represented by Teamsters Local 117.
In a previous Seattle Times Article where the news broke on October 6, 2011, a Teamster representative stated that they are working to have the discharged employees reinstated.
The issue centers on the claim that the employees were allowed to pray on their two ten minute breaks. Hertz, according to both news sources, stated that majority of the employees had taken longer than the allotted time frame, and failed to clock out and then back in from their break. Teamsters’ Union state that the grounds for the lawsuit is in violation of union contract between the company and employees where they did not have to clock out for their ten minute break.
This begs the question, should these Muslim workers be reinstated and did Hertz violate their right to religious worship and freedom as protected by the First Amendment and Federal statutes that protect work place discrimination against one’s faith and religious practice? Or, is this a false lawsuit claim against the car company where the workers are trying to exert the persecution card in retaliation of the fact that they violated company policy and protocol?
Personally, it is of the opinion that while American citizens have the privilege of worshiping and practicing their religious beliefs without fear of discrimination and persecution, this case seems to be a fallacious lawsuit claim on a false premise. Meaning, it is not about religion but about a company exerted and enforcing current policy on legal breaks. Having worked in various fields and industries, almost all companies have attendance policy, and Washington State law establishes that an employee is allowed two ten minute breaks and one half-hour unpaid break in any given eight hour work shift. In fact, the WAC stipulates that an employee has the right to have a ten minute paid break for every two hours work and an unpaid thirty-minute break within every five-hour work shift:
(1) Since the purpose of meal periods and rest breaks is to provide rest from work, they must not be scheduled near the beginning of the work shift.
(2) The following specific regulations apply to your minors who are fourteen-years-old and fifteen-years-old:
(a) They must not work more than four hours without being given a meal period. This meal period must be at least thirty minutes in length and be separate and distinct from, and in addition to, the rest breaks mandated by this subsection.
(b) They must be given, on your business's time, a rest break of at least ten minutes for every two hours worked.
(c) When they work four-hour periods, they cannot be required to work more than two hours without being given either a ten-minute rest break or a thirty-minute meal period.
Therefore, if the company establishes legal precedence in when and how employees are allowed their breaks, and fulfills the labor laws, how can this become a religious discrimination lawsuit? It only becomes a discrimination lawsuit when a minority group uses such legal machination against an employer to force the employer to bow to their preferential treatment that allows them to continue to violate company and state labor laws themselves. It also becomes a case of “special treatment” where they exclusively want to bend the rules of the company, but will not allow other people of different faiths to allow the same accommodations. For instance, if it were twenty-five evangelical Christians who were discharged for violating and taking extended breaks than what was allotted, there would be no religious discrimination lawsuit and those Christians would have no basis of a legal defense claim on such premise. However, these twenty-five former employees are Muslim by faith and Somalia by ethnicity and are using their minority and religious status as a retaliation against a company that enforced company policy.
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