Written by Don Byrd
Two interesting claims of workplace religious discrimination have reached a conclusion.
In one, Burger King settled the claim of a worker who refused the employee dress code because her Pentecostal beliefs require her to wear dresses or skirts. The fast food chain agreed to go through corporate training on workplace accommodation of religious beliefs and to pay the plaintiff $25,000. You can read the consent decree here (pdf).
In the other, a judge dismissed an EEOC complaint (pdf) on behalf of a Rent-A-Center employee whose religious beliefs prohibited him from working on Saturdays. The court found the company had demonstrated an “undue hardship” in accommodating those beliefs.
The Court will not require RAC to undertake the accommodation. Leaving the store without a Store Manager on Saturdays would cause an “undue hardship” to RAC by “impair[ing] [critical] functions”—it would deprive the store of the significant supervisory, managerial, customer-care and other functions that RAC Store Managers are charged with at the very time when these functions are most needed. Because of the importance of the position, the centrality of Saturdays in RAC’s weekly cycle, and of RAC’s scheduling policy reflects these two facts by requiring all Store Managers to work on Saturdays, this Court is satisfied that the evidence shows that leaving the position blank on Saturdays imposes “more than a de minimis cost” on the conduct of RAC’s business.
