Articles Posted in Religion

noun-religion-3817675-1024x1024

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids employers from discriminating against employees based on religion. As the EEOC points out, “the law protects not only people who belong to traditional, organized religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, but also others who have sincerely held religious, ethical or moral beliefs.”

While the law may not protect folks who pray to flying spaghetti monsters, Title VII can apply to others who are not members of conventional religious groups. As the EEOC notes, “just because an individual’s religious practices may deviate from commonly-followed tenets of the religion, the employer should not automatically assume that his or her religious observance is not sincere.” Continue reading

noun-reflection-3339061-1024x1024

Last night, I read a decision from a federal court in New York involving a plaintiff, who is Jewish, who claimed that her employer and her supervisor discriminated against her based on her religion.

The plaintiff identified many incidents that, in her view, demonstrate bias against her as a Jewish person, either in the form of overtly anti-Semitic comments or what she refers to as microaggressions. Among them, the plaintiff claimed that her supervisor told her that she “does not want an old Jewish woman running a multicultural department.”

But here’s the thing.

Continue reading

noun-religion-5293525-1024x1024

Yesterday, on the same day that some of the Supreme Court noted that Congress hadn’t changed Title VII’s undue hardship standard for religious accommodations, the House and Senate reintroduced the Do No Harm Act, which the bill sponsors claim will “address the increasing use of religious freedom as a justification to undermine civil rights protections.” Continue reading

noun-hockey-5475364

It’s 2023.

When are employees going to learn that while the First Amendment does guarantee freedom of speech, there is no constitutional right to a job, and employers don’t have to tolerate employee hate speech?
Continue reading

noun-supreme-court-149365

Last May, I wrote about this religious discrimination case involving an employer’s duty to accommodate a plaintiff who needed Sundays off to observe his religion. The court decided the case in favor of the employer, which led to this appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in August, asking that it revisit its 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. HardisonIn Hardison, the Court concluded that Title VII of the Civil Rights act of 1964 does not require a religious accommodation if it results in more than a de minimis cost to the employer, i.e., an undue hardship.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Continue reading

noun-father-and-son-4387083

Yesterday, I wrote about a man who claimed that his employer retaliated against him by forcing him to resign after he objected to attending workplace training on anti-racism and gender identity.

It was a good story. We employment lawyers have plenty of them. But, perhaps, it wasn’t great.

But what if I told you that the man’s son also worked for the same employer, objected to attending the same training modules, and eventually sued the same employer for race and religious discrimination? Continue reading

“Doing What’s Right – Not Just What’s Legal”
Contact Information