Right outta the playbook...A Muslim advocacy group that last year helped mediate a worker dispute at a JBS Swift & Co. packing plant in Nebraska on Thursday said it hopes to do the same in Greeley where 103 Muslim workers were fired.
Officials at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based civil-rights group, said the dispute over prayer time at the Greeley slaughterhouse is the worst they've seen in the country. "We've never seen anything like the wholesale firings to this degree, and it makes me wonder what's really going on there," council spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said Thursday.
Ummmmm... they don't follow the rules of the company they work for so they got fired? You can thank me later, Ibby.
A nearly identical rift occurred last year at a JBS packing plant in Grand Island, Neb., when Muslim workers walked off the job when they were refused prayer time. Three workers were fired for leaving stations without permission, and 90 quit.
The council filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of the workers, which is pending. Workers in Nebraska gave managers a 45-minute window in which prayer breaks were necessary; in Greeley the workers offered a 10-minute window, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The Greeley workers, all Muslim and many Somalian, were fired Wednesday for not reporting to work after nearly 400 walked off the job Friday saying they were denied prayer time. At issue is a request by the workers for a 10-minute prayer break at sundown. Workers said they were refused the break on Friday but had been allowed the break previously.
About 120 employees returned to work Tuesday after JBS officials said they'd accommodate the need for Muslim prayers, but only during a universal meal break that turns out to be too late for the religious practice and too early for other workers.
Ahmed Mohamud, one of the fired workers and a spokesman for the group, said the workers told JBS managers "we would take pay cuts for the time we are praying, but they refused."
A JBS spokeswoman said she was unaware of the civil rights group's desire to help the Greeley workers.
Disputes between companies and Muslim employees over time to pray are nothing new, Hooper said. "The problems we've seen in the past involved the sunset prayer, which is only one of five that is specifically tied to a time of day," he said. "The other four are general times with a window of opportunity. But the sunset prayer is, by definition, at sunset."
So suck it up...INFIDEL!
The most friction occurs during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began Sept. 1, where practitioners fast from sunrise to sunset and break the fast just ahead of evening prayers.