A group of people at a Mission Foods plant in New Brighton, with the assistance of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), is suing Mission Foods for religious discrimination. The allegation is that these women are being threatened with being fired because they won't wear the workplace uniforms, and prefer to wear their traditional clothing (which generally covers the body in totality).
On one hand, I see the company's point. There are reasons people are required to wear certain gear for work. Many of these reasons are for safety. At a tortilla-processing plant, I imagine safety would be of great concern. Loose-fitting clothing is more likely than tighter clothing to get caught in the equipment. Companies pay a lot of insurance premiums, and have to take all precautions against workplace accidents. You can bet that if anything was to happen to these women, CAIR would be suing Mission Foods for that.
The other thing to keep in mind is that no one is putting a gun to the heads of these women forcing them to work there. They could find work at a place that is more amenable to their cultural norms. Such places do exist.
On the other hand, we as a nation have to get used to the idea that people who aren't "like us" are here, and will be here for the long haul. There has to be some accommodation for religious beliefs. There has to be some give on the other side, but if there is a way to accommodate these women, Mission Foods ought to do it. I can't imagine that there are a lot of people who are clamoring for work at a tortilla plant, even in this economy. Heck, I didn't even know that Minnesota would even have any tortilla plants. Then again, there probably are some parallels between making tortillas and making lefse. If these are otherwise good employees, I don't think it's too much to ask to help the six employees out on this. Then again, maybe they did.
I am a little disturbed about the comments that readers posted on that site, as they are pretty ugly. You have the usual "to hell with them" comments, sprinkled nicely with "love it or leave it" types. There have been people like this for as long as there has been a United States. I would like to think we can get past this someday. Apparently now is not that time. That is a shame.
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We'll never get past it, Mike. There is always hatred in the human heart. It's part of that tidy little package called "original sin."
As for the case itself, the issue isn't safety so much as sanitation. Workers in food manufacturing facilities have to wear specific clothing and follow specific procedures to ensure that sanitation is up to snuff and to prevent the possibility of food-borne illness. This is why you'll see women wearing hijabs working in the checklanes at a Target store but never working behind the counter at the restaurants. Of course Target has had difficulty with hijab-wearing women refusing to ring up pork products, but that's another post, I suppose.
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