Sunday, October 23, 2011
It Hurts to Work for Hertz
Hertz rental car company has fired 26 of its employees at a Seattle airport branch because they refuse to clock out during their prayer times. The Associated Press reports that a local workers union which represents a large portion of the Muslim employees at Hertz does not find this action to be constitutional. According to spokesman Tom Zilly of the union Teamsters 117 feels that Hertz did not follow their own internal policy, as they agreed to allow the workers to be paid during their prayers a year ago. Hertz claims that the workers were violating a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reached two years ago. The company stated that the work environment was tarnished when workers would often take more time with their prayers than necessary.
Constitutionally, this brings up the question of whether or not the Muslim workers were discriminated against because of their religion. Technically, they are allowed to leave work to pray but they cannot be paid for the time when they are out of work. Are the employees’ constitutional rights to freely exercise their religion being violated? Should employees be paid for prayer time?
Personally, I find that Hertz has not discriminated against these Muslim workers. I agree with the company that the employees could be taking advantage of the paid free time to do other things that were not work. Even if there were no work related issues, I still think that paying people to pray does not make much sense to me. Companies should constitutionally oblige to allow their employees time out of work to pray, but it should not have to be paid. In Sherbert v. Verner we saw that the court gave unemployment compensation to a woman who could not work on Saturdays due to her religion when she could not find a job. While this is similar in nature to this instance, it differs in the fact that Muslims do not have to miss a significant amount of time to pray. Financially, I feel that they would not be burdened as much as the woman in Sherbert.
Tom Zilly feels that Hertz should not have given such a harsh ultimatum and could have instead sat down with their employees and reached some sort of compromise. I feel that this is not a good argument. Hertz has the right to fire and hire employees at will, just like all other companies. Nowhere in most contracts of employment does it say that the company must negotiate with an employee instead of fire them. While it may be courteous to do so, it is not a legal obligation.
At the end of this argument, I find Hertz is doing nothing wrong legally and the workers union is blowing things out of proportion. The workers are allowed to leave work to pray, so they can freely exercise their religion. Unfortunately for them, their religion may take away a little bit of their pay, but I don’t feel that it would amount to be enough to place a heavy financial burden on them.
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