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Feature: Lawsuits Forcing Employers To Rethink Prejudicial Practices
WASHINGTON, June 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Waffle House is most definitely a Southern restaurant. To anyone who recognizes the bright yellow-and-black signs found at over 1,200 sites in more than 20 U.S. states, it's a place for down-home cookin', breakfast 24 hours a day, hot food and fast service. Its own website refers to the restaurant as "a Southern icon."
For all that the South represents, it's a bit of a shock to realize that 136 years after the Civil War and four decades after the major progresses of the civil rights movement, in some places it still suggests racism, prejudice, discrimination, hatred and injustice.
A recent account on NPR's "All Things Considered" radio show explored a particular case of racial discrimination at a Waffle House restaurant. In May of this year, five African-American men stopped by a Waffle House in Monroe, N.C. - a suburb of the state's largest city, Charlotte - for a late-night dinner. They were members of a gospel band relaxing post-concert at a self-proclaimed "family-friendly" joint, but their Waffle House experience was anything but friendly.
"It was like I was in a time warp," band member Shelton Gordon said on the NPR broadcast. The men sat down to order their food, and a security guard approached them, telling them they had to leave, "because I'm gonna let these people, these white people, sit down," Gordon quoted the guard as saying.
When the men questioned the guard - reacting with the same shock and outrage many of us would - the guard kicked them out of the restaurant, taunting them with racist remarks.
The men are now, of course, suing both Waffle House, Inc. and the franchisee that owns the particular restaurant in Monroe. Their suit is one of nearly 100 civil rights lawsuits brought against Waffle House or its franchisees since 1995, by both customers and employees complaining of civil rights violations, NPR reported.
The lawyer for a Waffle House manager who was fired last year because he refused to replace black employees with whites said that his was "a throwback case."
"Really, we're dealing with the kind of systemic discrimination institutionally we saw back in the fifties and sixties," attorney Keenan Nix said on the NPR broadcast.
NPR's report also said that Waffle House, Inc. - while it states simply that it "does not tolerate discrimination" - would not speak to the media about its lawsuits or its policies on discrimination.
This attitude of discrimination is often a familiar one for Muslims in America as well, where the discrimination - in the workplace or elsewhere - is usually based on outward expressions of religious identity, such as hijab (headcovering) or beards.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has cited, protested and successfully dealt with countless occasions of such discriminatory acts, in which women are often not hired because of their hijabs or men are fired because they refuse to shave their beards.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which takes such cases to court, resolved 2,230 cases of religious-based discrimination in the year 2000, an increase of about 70% since 1992.
These cases were usually resolved with an explanation of religious beliefs or the threat of lawsuits, the article added.
Under United States Code, which includes acts of Congress, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in hiring or in employment practices based on an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," and defines religion as "all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief."
It also states that "unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate to an employee's or prospective employee's religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business," these laws regarding discrimination apply unconditionally.
Employers are often ignorant of Islamic rulings about hijab or beards, and therefore react with the knowledge that they have, in spite of the legal protection that the Civil Rights Act offers employees.
Some find that Muslim defendants in these cases can usually win based on the law that protects them, in terms of the nature of their religious practices. Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post columnist and founder of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, argued in a November 2000 article that, "whatever complaints Muslims may have about life in America… they cannot legitimately complain about a lack of receptivity to these issues.
"…Employees with grievances can make out fabulously well in court… When a Muslim goes to court over [the beard] issue, he invariably wins," Pipes wrote.
Just this month, the Federal Express Corporation (FedEx) was ordered by the EEOC to allow male employees to wear beards for religious reasons. The decree stemmed from a Muslim FedEx employee's complaint last March that the company violated the laws stated above by not allowing him to wear his beard, CAIR said.
But this case is only one in a seemingly endless list of acts of discrimination based on religion, and despite the success stories, the numbers keep on rising.
And, as Arabia Online reported, most of these CAIR success stories are only a handful of the actual cases of discrimination against Muslims in the workplace.
However, lawsuits, whether brought by racial or religious minorities, mount daily, and are forcing employers to recognize that even the slightest discriminatory offense may spark a litany of litigation.
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