Religious Accommodation
LBORN
4 Posts
I just found out that one of my Dept Managers has been accommodating a Muslim dietary employee's religious beliefs by scheduling another staff person on the day she works because she cannot prepare or serve pork or clean up areas where pork has been served. The extra person then performs all of these duties which is 75% of her duties. This has been going on for almost a year. This accommodation is adding an extra 30 hours per week to my staffing budget. Because this practice has been going on (without my persmission) am I obligated to continue the practice, or can I at this point consider it to be an unreasonable religious accommodation?
Comments
Are you in the loop when people are hired? Do your hiring managers really understand 'religious accommodation?'
What I would do now is go back to the department manager and review the schedule. There may be some way to work it in without affecting the budget or imposing on another employee.
As for this situation, what is the Muslim employee doing while the other EE handles the work? Are they sitting around watching? I would either reassign this person on pork days (& make sure they had real work), or I would expect them to use vacation time to be gone on pork days. To have them on the clock, but not working, does not seem reasonable to me.
And one more question, how does that add 30 hrs per week to your staffing? Another person doing 75% of an 8 hour shift would be 6 hours of extra staffing a week. I don't even believe 6 hours of extra staffing is reasonable, so if its really 30 hours, its outrageous & I would question the manager's ability to make staffing decisions.
As for your questions:
The other scheduled employee works about 6 hours to perform the duties the Muslim employee cannot do. So while the other employee performs the "pork" related duties, this employee pours coffee and juice and generally stands around and does nothing. Can you believe it.
By the way, the manager who allowed this no longer works for us-No Surprise!