JUDGMENT DAY FOR DUNKIN' DONUTS IN BIBLE FIGHT
Christian worker booted for wanting to obey 10 Commandments
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Judgment Day has come for a Dunkin’ Donuts franchisee that rescinded its job offer to a Christian man solely because he wanted to keep the weekly Sabbath holy, which is one of the Ten Commandments.
As WND reported last September, Darrell Littrell of Asheville, North Carolina, is a Seventh-day Adventist who holds the belief he cannot work on the Sabbath day, which he observes from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the donut maker on Littrell’s behalf and has now won its case, forcing the franchisee to pay $22,000 and take measures to prevent religious discrimination in the future.
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Darrell Littrell
According to the EEOC, “Around Dec. 15, 2012, Littrell applied for the position of a donut maker at the Citi Brands’ manufacturing facility in Arden, North Carolina, and was later interviewed by the company’s plant manager.
“On Jan. 3, 2013, the plant manager offered Littrell the donut maker position, and told Littrell he would start work the next afternoon, a Friday, at 3 p.m.
“Littrell responded that he could not start work on Friday afternoon because as part of his faith, he does not work from sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday. The plant manager responded by revoking Littrell’s job offer.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from refusing to hire people because of their religion, and requires employers to provide a reasonable accommodation for an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs so long as doing so does not create an undue hardship for the employer.
In addition to paying $22,000 in damages to Littrell, the five-year consent decree resolving the lawsuit includes injunctive relief prohibiting the company from discriminating on the basis of religion in the future. The settlement also provides that Citi Brands will implement a policy regarding religious accommodation, conduct annual training for all employees, and report religious accommodation requests to the EEOC. Citi Brands LLC will also post a copy of its policy on religious accommodation in all of its North Carolina restaurants and facilities.
“Religious discrimination is a continuing problem in the American workplace,” said Lynette A. Barnes, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Charlotte District Office. “Under federal laws, employers have an obligation to balance employees’ needs and rights to practice their religion with the conduct of the employer’s business. Where there is a minimal impact on the business, those religious needs must be accommodated.”
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The Ten Commandments on display at the 13th annual Bible Marathon in Stuart, Fla. (WND photo / Joe Kovacs)
According to the Jewish Week, Dunkin’ Donuts has more than two dozen kosher locations among its 10,000 sites, and some Jewish leaders are praising the government’s defense of the Christian man.
“We applaud the EEOC for bringing this lawsuit,” Mordechai Biser, general counsel for Agudath Israel of America told Jewish Week. “Employers need to know that it is illegal to refuse to hire an employee because of his or her religion, and that they are required by federal law to attempt to accommodate Sabbath observance in the workplace.
“Whether the employee is a Seventh-day Adventist, an Orthodox Jew, or anyone else who observes a day as his or her Sabbath, employers must make a reasonable effort to accommodate that observance.”
Read WND’s groundbreaking news story about the Sabbath: ‘Deception’: Christians war over worship day
Sara Jodka, a senior associate in the Columbus, Ohio, law firm of Porter Wright, told Employee Benefit News that employers in all industries and sizes can deal with employees’ religious needs easily and effectively by applying Americans with Disabilities Act policies to religious situations.
“Employers are very comfortable that they have to provide accommodation for disabilities, but they have either lost sight, or are not cognizant, that there is also a reasonable accommodation requirement under Title VII,” she told EBN. “And when someone does bring up a religious accommodation issue, they have to understand that they have a duty to basically stop and think, and they have the duty to engage in the same interactive dialogue that they would if this was a disability case.”
She said applying the undue-burden standard, similar to what is argued in ADA-type cases, to religious situations may not be as difficult as some employers think.
“Case law has said that an employer will meet at an undue burden requirement if it can prove that to let this employee [have time] off and not hold them to the same schedule would have meant they needed to hire other people,” Jodka said. “[The employer] would have to pay expenses in the form of overtime for other employees, or it would have saddled employees with additional work.”
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The commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy is found initially in Exodus 20:8-11:
“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”
In recent years, a number of Sabbath-keepers have gone to court to protect their religious beliefs.
Just last month, a federal judge ruled that Mini Price Storage of Virginia Beach, Virginia, fired employee Sean Mohammed in 2011 in retaliation for his refusal to work on the Sabbath. The worker was awarded more than $150,000 in back pay.
In April, according to Adventist Review, three retired federal government employees who worked as ushers for the Washington Nationals went to court on accusations that the baseball team changed its work policy to prevent them from skipping games between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday to observe the Sabbath.
And in July 2014, air-traffic controller Matthew Gray won a complaint against a U.S. government labor union that ordered him to work on the Sabbath in retaliation for his decision to quit the union.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/07/judgment-day-for-famous-eatery-in-sabbath-fight/#ZHew2bJsCd5svOEf.99
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