This weekend, “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” was re-running “classic” episodes, and in one segment, a person claimed that his officemates had all become vegetarian or vegan, and ultimately, HR informed him that the office had voted to go meat-free and any meat products found in the office refrigerator would be disposed of in the future.
Several questions: Assuming such a thing actually happened, would the employee have any recourse? What if it were not just “no meat in the office”, but a requirement that the employee give up meat altogether?
Interesting, I would suspect that at least under Federal law there would be limited recourse. “Eating meat” isn’t specifically protected activity under labor laws, at least as I understand them from previous discussions of labor laws and the posters we have up here at my business.
I’m taking it you mean “banning meat eat altogether” to mean even when the employee is off premises or at home. I think a company can in fact regulate your behavior out of the work place without running afoul of Federal law. I think enforcement would be a practical impossibility, though.
I don’t know nearly enough about State laws, but many are far more protecting of what your employer can tell you to do or not and it may run afoul of those. But this is one of those nonsense concepts, the real limiter is meat eating is very popular. Companies with such a policy instantly reduce their pool of available applicants by 95% and will likely lose that one employee left who eats meat. It is atypical for an entire office to be vegetarian/vegan, and the company would have considerable recruitment difficulties when those employees left/retired/were lost to regular sorts of attrition.
Unless the employee has an employment contract with terms protecting him, the employer is free to ban meat from the workplace.
And unless there’s an applicable state law preventing employment discrimination in the basis of diet (that’s not tied to religion), they are free not to employ meat-eaters.
In the hypothetical, I can picture the employee wrapping his or her lunch in wax paper or something equally opaque, so its contents were invisible, then bringing in a non-meat meal, and if they find the food was unwrapped by someone looking for meat, kicking up a fuss about personal property being vandalized and their food possibly adulterated by inspection of unclear hygiene…
Or they could go the religious route and find a scripture passage about meat-eating. Ultimately, they’d have to decide if the job was worth the hassle.
That was the funniest of the “Bluff the Listener” stories, and I really really wanted it to be the true one. I at least wanted the panelist who read it to get the points, even if I didn’t get Carl Cassel’s voice on my answering machine.
Still, I knew it wasn’t the right one, because: a) it was a clip show; and b) such a policy would subject HR to SUCH a claim for creating a hostile work environment, that nobody would try it.
If you are a valuable enough employee, then you just threaten to walk and, push come to shove, find employment with a direct competitor. Happens in advertising (I hear stories).
I could easily imagine certain businesses that would try to set up something like this–a branch of PETA, for example, or a Hare Krishna-run restaurant. I wouldn’t find it especially obnoxious if it was only in the workplace; if it were also outside of the workplace, I’d find it about as obnoxious as a soda manufacturer’s requirement that its employees not be seen in public consuming the competitor’s product.
We have had an employee object to other employees “polluting” the refrigerator by storing pork in there. He was told to basically go to hell. He HAD to bring his lunch in because he couldn’t eat in the cafeteria or any nearby restaurants, because they were all similarly polluted.
The proposed remedy was for him to be allowed a personal mini fridge in his cube. Normally these are forbidden, but an exception was made. I though this was a reasonable accommodation.
We had the guy over for a party at our house. He wouldn’t eat anything either prepared in our house or served in our dishes. I guess they were all polluted by pork as well. He wouldn’t even eat a cheese pizza that was delivered, because Papa Gino’s kitchen was polluted. He ate chips out of a wooden bowl and nibbled on a fruit tray. The fruit tray was prepared at a caterer who also prepared the ham, turkey, prosciutto, and cheese tray. But I guess you have to draw the line somewhere. I guess a wooden bowl would not have ever been used for storing pork.
He also took off for a few minutes. He said his prayers in his car. Our whole house was polluted by a dog, apparently.
I found none of this too strange, having grown up in Pakistan. My wife (who is Chinese) was ready to kick him out of the party. She took the idea of someone thinking our house was unclean very personally.
The religious thing with Halal / Kosher would be a far more interesting question.
By definition - a dish that is used to cook pork is no longer halal.
So if the workplace instituted a rule that “all food in the fridge must be halal” I would be screwed - by definition nothing from my kitchen is halal. At the same time, in a country where about 25% of the population is Muslem, keeping the fridge Halal is not unreasonable.
What a weird douche of a dude. I’ve known several people who keep kosher. Not that I know a whole lot about it, but they simply brought their own food, kept it in their own containers/cool packs, and didn’t make any noise about it. Explained when asked, and politely declined offers of other food. No big deal ever. This guy really thought he was something special.
I work in a place full of vegans. No one makes a fuss here, either. I also don’t eat meat in my workplace the large majority of the time, but some do, and it all goes into the same fridge. Though our Director of Development is going a little overboard, butting heads with board members about making our fundraising events vegan. I chimed in that people shelling $125 for a charity event ticket won’t be happy if there’s not at least pescetarian/vegetarian offerings. Forcing vegan only food on non-vegans for an event they’re paying for is not cool.
I thought this was a myth, but last week on a flight, the person across the aisle from me first asked the flight attendant what brand of “white soda” they had, and on not getting a satisfactory response worked his way through several other soft drink queries before settling on the water. I looked at his laptop which was adorned with “property of PepsiCo IT dept” stickers. Maybe not company policy but that guy certainly had some brand loyalty.
My company bans tobacco from the premises (not just using it, but you can’t even leave your smokes in the car), all of our customer’s premises, and has a rule saying you can’t smell like tobacco while working either. You also can’t be a smoker on your own time, even if you follow all those rules.
Not a problem for me, and I’m sure it is impossible to enforce, but they certainly have the legal right to make those rules. I don’t see why meat would be any different.
It was a bit too outrageous to be believed but incidents like this are not without precedent. Henry Ford supposedly used to closely monitor his workers both on and off the job to make sure they weren’t doing things like drinking alcohol or even listening to jazz. If one of Ford’s company spies saw you take a sip of beer or listen to a Louie Armstrong record, you were immediately canned.
I actually hope some employer goes berserk and starts making crazy rules like bumper stickers on cars, diet, … As extreme as possible. We need a major backlash against unfettered employer power.