Fatwa arriving in 3, 2, 1...

NOT DELL employees! Temp workers that were employed by Spherion.

My sympathies lie with Dell here. Either do the job you are hired to do or work elsewhere. If the job interferes with your religious belief, no one is holding a gun to your head saying you have to choose Dell over Allah.

This has nothing to do with "tolerance" or "diversity" or any of those other politically correct pieties we are told to subscribe to.

Idiots.

No wonder why my Dell demands that I end the occupation of my desktop.

At laaaaaast...
A big KMA to the Religon of Intolerance.

Dan Patterson
Arrogant Infidel

If you can't do the job, don't take the job. It doesn't matter if your faith requires you to do something, if you can't find a way to shoehorn your faith into the workplace, then get another job.

With office work, this wouldn't be a problem, but with an assembly line or warehousing situation where others are depending on you doing your part, you can't just up and leave at different times every day and claim that as a right.

Think about it. There is a line, somewhere. 10 minute break from the cubicle? OK. Taking a job in a sausage plant and demanding that the company stop using pork products? NOT OK. Somewhere in between there exists a reasonable boundary.

This reminds me of an incident, in FL, IIRC, where a woman was fired from a Muslim owned company for eating a ham sandwhich in the lunch room. The owners said they were justified for firing her because of their rights to "religious freedom". By which, in this case, they meant "the right to force their religious beliefs on their employees".

Muslims are many things, but they are not pagans.

Save our wrath there for the stupid wicca crazies.

But yeah, if you don't do your job properly, you get your ass fired. Fairs fair. Pray in your own goddamn time.

I hear my inner personal injury attorney calling.

I feel a little queasy over this. Employers should within reason try to accomodate the religious requirements of their employees. It is the 'within reason' bit that is tricky.

I am myself a practicing Russian Orthodox which means I worship according to the OLD Calender. In practice this means that our holy days do NOT align with the dates accepted by the majority, I ususally have to go to work on my Christmas day, 7th January on the civil calender and Good Friday.

I have never heard any of my co-religionists complain about this or expect any special accomodation.

If the Somalis win this one, I expect to see an article headlined Muslim Wine-Tasters Sue Over Job Requirements.

I wonder why the founding fathers wanted a wall of separation between church and state after reading this? They should have stated these prayer requirements on their application. I once worked with an orthodox friend whose sabbath is Satrurday and he put on his application that he was not available Saturdays. When they tried to fire him for refusing to work overtime on Saturdays he just pointed that out and the company did not have a leg to stand on. Otherwise I agree with those of you who say that business is first and they can pray on their own time.

I'm not sure who the dumbass is here - Dell or the Muslims. When in Rome, act like a Roman. If the Muslims want to work at Dell, they'll just have to pray on their own time, not company time. At Rusty's place, he explained this is a lot more detail and it seems to me that Dell has bent over backwards for these Muslims but if they were working for me, they would just have to change their schedules to do their praying at home on their own time.

Cindy

This smells like a group waiting for CAIR to take up their "plight".

Islam is actually very flexible when it comes to thing like this. Delaying prayers due to pressing commitments is done all the time, in every Muslim country. Friday noon prayers are the only special ones, but even they can be made up for if they're missed or delayed.

Either these Somalis don't know their religion very well or they're making bogus claims to some other end.

CAIR *is* taking up their "plight". Suprise...?

My take is that the "reasonable" clause is about as well-thought-out as the "cruel and unusual" clause brought up in the recent SCOTUS case. Jokes about Orthodox jews working at a bacon plant spring to mind unbidden ...

That said... how unreasonable is it to request a 2-minute break a few times a day? Does it take any longer to do a prayer session than to go to the john, or take a smoke break? At all my previous jobs, even the menial minimum-wage types, they gave you like a 15-minute (sometimes unpaid) smoke/goofing-off break. While it might be inconvenient to let them take that 15 minutes in several 3-minute chunks, as long as they don't abuse the policy, I don't see a reason to fire them. If they were paramedics, who lost a patient because they had to stop and pray or something, sure, give 'em the toss, but what's the problem with a few minutes of break, if they account the time against their alotted smoke/lunch/bathroom break time?

I get the feeling there's *something* else to this story...

Update: posted before I read the article. Newbie mistake -- d'oh!

The "something else" appears to be that *I* had pictured something like tech-support, where the 5 minutes off could be "made up" later. Not so -- this is closer to the paramedic situation than I thought -- that 5 minutes costs the company money and might even pose a safety issue. The fact is, if this was a government office, somebody might be able to make an argument (invariably a bad one, but...) that there's an obligation to accomodate, but this is a private company. If you don't like it, take your ball and leave.

They said they had to "choose between their job and their religion": damn straight. As a Catholic, I won't take a job at an abortion clinic. If I were orthodox jewish, I wouldn't take a job where I had to work Saturdays. If I were muslim, I wouldn't take a job making pork rinds. If I were a single mother, I would hunt down a job where I have the flexibility to take time off if my kid needed me. Only you know your special needs, and contrary to what the Democratic party is shouting at the top of its lungs, nobody owes it to you to cater to them.

You don't have to choose between a job and your religion, just this job and your religion.

As a Dell employee a couple of years ago, I saw and documented a few things worse than restricting the right to pray. I've posted most of it today at my blog. I really think Dell needs to reapproach how it structures its rules for employees, though I think it is evident that high turnover of its employees has been $$ beneficial $$ to the company.