So you believe that as a matter of law, Disney’s offer to wait two months and work out of sight in the meantime is not a reasonable accomodation?
They’d have to show that the delay of X months was reasonable. What took them so long to make a hijab?
There is no indication that Disney have given her a timescale.
How long will she have been waiting by the time the case gets to court?
How long should she wait to bring the case?
If here rights are being ignored what is a reasonable time to wait to try and rectify the situation?
As I suggested above:
Due to what circumstances or peculiarities of this job do you think wearing a non-company-designed hijab on an interim basis while Disney designs their own (and in lieu of working “out of sight”) poses an undue hardship to the company? These are usually pretty demure accoutrements, after all.
Do you think the two options (wearing her own vs. working in the back) are equivalently reasonable accommodations from the POV of the employee? Does either one represent a significantly greater genuine hardship to Disney?
I’d say that allowing her to wear something that they feel is non-Disney presents a significant hardship to Disney. They spend millions of dollars and painstakingly pay attention to every minor detail in the furtherance of their brand. If they feel her hijab, or any other religious garb takes away from the Disney experience then that is a hardship. Her working in the back for the same pay inconveniences one person, and temporarily at that.
As the EEOC Compliance manual, cited supra, points out, “image” or “brand management” is not cognizable as a hardship. And frankly, as an argument, it amounts to “we can’t allow her to wear her own hijab because our image is based, in part, on not letting her wear her own hijab.”
Consider “brand management” as the corporate flip side to an individual plaintiff’s “mental anguish.” You don’t get to plead it unless you can also point to some concrete, particular, and objective injury that gives rise to it.
Well, Disney’s approach to the appearance of their employees is not a pretext. They style their employees “Cast members,” and their whole raison detre seems to be involve a highly specific imaginary role. They’re not simply “restaurant hostesses,” in other words, but characters in whatever theme the restaurant happens to be.
This places their interest above, say, a rental car company, which may have a generalized interest in image but nothing more.
And again I’ll point out the language I quoted earlier:
Note that they do not reject the per se back office solution. Their finding rests on the fact that Alamo required her to remove the scarf by virtue of the fact that it required her to serve customers. That paragraph seems to suggest that a temporary back office solution was quite tenable.
I don’t believe it’s correct to ask which is the greater hardship to Disney, as though the law requires that Disney’s claim fails unless the greatest hardship is felt. As long as Disney can identify a hardship, their burden is met.
Not quite. Any accommodation is a hardship after all—there is a cost of investigating and negotiating a solution and then implementing and monitoring it.
Disney must furnish a reasonable accommodation unless it would present an undue hardship to the company. And you are right, it need not be the accommodation the employee prefers. “Where there is more than one reasonable accommodation that would not pose an undue hardship, the employer is not obliged to provide the accommodation preferred by the employee. However, an employer’s proposed accommodation will not be “reasonable” if a more favorable accommodation is provided to other employees for non-religious purposes, or, for example, if it requires the employee to accept a reduction in pay rate or some other loss of a benefit or privilege of employment and there is an alternative accommodation that does not do so.” (EEOC Compliance Manual).
I put it to you that taking an employee from a customer-facing position to a back-office position so materially alters the nature of the job, the skills it inculcates, and the promotion track it affords as to amount a loss of some of the benefits or privileges of employment in that position.
It is this that I was getting at by insinuating the two options are at best equally burdensome to Disney (although neither is an undue hardship). But from the employee’s perspective, they are not equally accommodating. And in light of this, the option that more fully accommodates (and note, I’d be prepared, confidently, to argue that sending an employee to the back isn’t really an accommodation at all) while representing an equal burden to the company is the one that must be adopted.
How did the Alamo case turn out, by the by? It’s not the same as this case, is it?
Sorry, but this is a fiction. It’s no different than employers referring to their staff as “team members” or “associates” as opposed to “staff” or “peasants”.
*All *Disney park employees are referred to as cast members. That includes members of management who walk around in (their own) suits, and custodial staff who work behind the scenes and are never in contact with guests. Hell, it even includes the captains of the two Disney cruise liners.
Not if they’ve told other’s to just go ahead and wear THEIR religious garments but told THIS employee that she would have to wear Disney designed clothing because they were concerned about MUSLIM religious garments. If the action is targetted at her religion then I don’t think reasonable accomodations play into it at all.