Woman fired for eating pork

[Mighty_Girl]

@Phèdre nó Delaunay

Assuming this company has a parking lot, that lot is also company premises. If you are in your car in their parking lot, you are occupying their premises.

But the obviously biased article does not mention that. Can we refrain from assuming that she was banned from eating pork in her own car?

Surely there’s an argument to be made against the employer EVEN if she wasn’t banned from eating pork in her car. Going by that I could also assume she laughed maniacally while nuking bacon, but I won’t.

[Phedre_no_Delaunay]

Well sure! I agree that the parking lot assumption isn’t necessary. By these rules she wouldn’t even have been able to eat pork at her desk, even had it been some cold pork dish that didn’t need heating in the company microwave, and kept from spoiling in her own cooler kept at her desk.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Unlike Diogenes, I don’t care whether the company’s reason for banning pork was religious. The relevant legal factors, as I see them, are:

1. The company wanted to fire the woman.
2. The company’s reason for firing the woman was not a prohibited reason.
3. Therefore, the company acted legally.

Nobody has come close to showing otherwise: arguments that she was fired for being Catholic or for being non-Muslim are obviously incorrect, inasmuch as she was fired well after her non-Muslim status was known to her employers, and for a different reason.

The relevant ethical issues are:

1. Woman did something that upset lots of coworkers.
2. Boss asked woman not to upset coworkers.
3. Woman chose to repeat the act twice, once in an egregious fashion, when complying with the boss’s requirement would have inconvenienced her little if any.
4. Therefore, woman was a yutz who should be terminated.

Can a vegan boss require employees to eat vegan food? I suspect this question is ill-framed: surely you mean can a vegan boss prohibit employees from eating non-vegan food. In any case, the answer is almost exactly the same:

1. The company makes a request of its employees as a condition of their employment.
2. I’ve seen no law that would prohibit this request–it’s not a request that employees engage in illegal, unethical, or unsafe behavior.
3. Therefore, the employer can make the request, and can fire employees that do not comply.

Note that there could be circumstances under which the request was illegal. If the company required employees to eat peanuts, a peanut-allergic employee could make a strong case that doing so was an illegal requirement (assuming the employee isn’t an actor in an ad for Snickers or something). Similarly, if an employee had a medical condition that required immediate access to a drug made in part from animal products (e.g., a gelatin-capsule), they could make a strong case that the employer’s requirement was in violation of safety codes.

But for the most part, employers get to make any damn fool requirement they like of their employees.

A few years ago, my boss at the humane society was sitting next to me at a fundraiser event we put on. The event’s organizer brought out a donkey-shaped pinata for the kids, and my boss just about lost it: it was all I could do to prevent her from stopping the event, which she was convinced would teach kids to abuse animals.

Crazy? Bizarre? You bet, and I still tease her about it. But here’s the thing: I’d never ever bring a pinata to work, nor would I use a pinata in an event I organized. Her organization; her rules. It’s not a requirement forbidden by law, so I gotta follow it.

Daniel

[DanBlather]

@Phèdre nó Delaunay

The company’s parking lot is a part of the company’s premises. I knew a guy whose company banned smoking from the premises, and all the smokers had to go stand on the sidewalk across from the parking lot. They were not allowed to smoke in their own cars in the company parking lot because “premises” encompasses the entire land owned by the company, not just inside the building.

The applicable definition of premises: a tract of land with the buildings thereon

Assuming this company has a parking lot, that lot is also company premises. If you are in your car in their parking lot, you are occupying their premises.

There have been cases of employees being fired because they forgot to remove their hunting rifle from their vehicle when parking in the company lot.

[Zoe]

Ivy Lass: guess my question is, how far does the employer get to go in dictating their religious beliefs to employees who do not practice their beliefs?

I guess that would depend on who the employer is. I would assume that the government cannot discriminate at all. And likewise I would assume that some businesses founded for religious purposes could have certain requirements. (I don’t really know the law.)

But that has nothing to do with the situation described in the OP. This employer was not dictating religious beliefs. They did not require that the woman change her viewpoint about whether or not pork is clean or unclean. They required that she respect their right to their religious practices. There is a difference.

If eating pork was a religious practice for her, or if she was unwiling to accomodate their practices, then she should never have accepted the position.

Sometimes I can curse with the best of the navy. When I went to work for a religious publishing house in my early twenties, I was certainly willing to choose my words more carefully out of respect for the people that I worked with. I knew they would find my language an affront to their religious beliefs. They would have found my words “dirty” (unclean) – even though I knew from my semantics class that words are not actually “dirty.”

At no time were they dictating religious beliefs to me. If I had been so thoughtless as not to adapt this accomodation myself, I’m sure they would have tried to dictate my behavior while at work. And I think that is their right as long as it doesn’t violate any laws.

If the behavior they want to dictate violated my own religious beliefs, I should never take the job. (That wasn’t the case in the OP.)

[Enginerd]

For those who are claiming religious discrimination, let’s consider what might happen to a Muslim employee who behaved the same way. This employee obviously does not observe all the restrictions that some others do, but he regularly attends a Mosque and observes the five pillars of Islam.

If this employee had behaved the same way the woman had, I would expect him to be fired too. It certainly wouldn’t be a case of religious discrimination, because he’s the same religion as the employer. He would be fired for being a “selfish cow” (or bull, since I seem to have changed his gender).

[TeaElle]

1. There is no such thing as an employment tribunal in the United States.
2. Most employment for non-management positions in the United States is not covered under a contract between the individual employee and the employer.