Written by Don Byrd
The EEOC is the federal entity charged with enforcing religious discrimination laws in the workplace setting. I have posted many times over the last few years about workplace discrimination suits brought by the EEOC on behalf of employees who claim their employer refuses to accommodate their religious needs.
In an interesting piece for the Washington Post, law professor Eugene Volokh looks deeper into the EEOC’s statistics to try and determined whether the agency is even-handed in its enforcement. Particularly, he wondered whether they engage in discrimination in favor of Muslim employees.
Here is an excerpt from his findings:
I got EEOC data on all such lawsuits from the start of 2009 until late October 2015 . . .
…
[C]ases involving Muslims represented a minority of all cases brought by the EEOC and generally involved the sorts of claims that are routinely brought by non-Muslims (with the truck drivers’ case being the one possible exception).
Now the Muslim employee cases definitely were a much higher percentage of total EEOC cases than the Muslim share of the U.S. population (which appears to be about 1 percent). But that makes sense: Different groups have different levels of need for religious accommodations, whether because their religious practices violate many employers’ work rules or because the employers are less likely to informally accommodate some groups than others.
…
So it generally looks to me like the EEOC is generally protecting a broad range of religious groups and enforcing the same religious accommodations for Muslims as it does for other religions.
Read the whole thing.
