Religious Disputes in the Workplace

Recently, a U.S. owned unit of Brazil JBS plants has fired nearly 200 Muslim Somali workers over a prayer dispute on the job. The Muslim Somali workers walked off the job after the JBS plants refused to accommodate their sunset prayer time with a break. All JBS workers already signed a labor contract specifying break times. The company said sunset falls in the middle of the second shift and that it would be too costly for the plants to have hundreds of workers take a break at the same time. The religion conflict that the U.S. owned company is facing is this: By denying the Islamic prayer break at sunset, the Muslim workers are arguably being denied their free exercise of religion and the government will be seen as being hostile toward religion. However, by granting the special prayer break, the U.S. government is in jeopardy of establishing such religion and will be seen as being favorable towards religion.

In drafting my own opinion about this case, I think that if the JBS plants grant the prayer break, they will be in violation of the establishment clause. I believe in the separation of church and state and I think that if we don’t honor the establishment clause, free exercise will eventually not exist. Also, I believe that there is a stronger argument supporting the clear violation of the establishment clause than that of the free exercise claim. When the Lemon test is applied to this case, it fails all three prongs. There is obviously no secular purpose. The change of break time is purely to accommodate one particular religion’s prayer time. The effect would advance religion. It would seem as though the company is endorsing and promoting Islam. Lastly, there would be excessive government entanglement. Because the prayer time is at sunset, and the time of sunset often changes, the company would have to continually change the time of the break so that it fell during sunset. This would be never-ending entanglement throughout the year. Something else I thought about was the idea of an analogous situation with Christian workers. I would imagine that if a large number of Christian workers asked for some sort of accommodation that would affect the operation of the entire company, people would immediately object because the government company would be establishing Christianity.

After thinking through this the first time, I was still torn because I was concerned about the Muslim workers’ fundamental right to free exercise. The Islam faith requires members to pray at five different times during the day- one of which is at sunset. The prayers are essential to the Islam faith. What needs to be remembered, then, is the concept of belief versus action. The first is absolute, but the second cannot be.

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