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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, January 18, 2003

Faith can spark friction in workplace

By Adam Geller
Associated Press

Carol Grotts, 27, sued Brink's Inc., saying that their requirement for her to wear pants conflicted with her Pentecostal belief against wearing men's clothes.

Associated Press

NEW YORK — By the time Carol Grotts arrived for her first day at Brink's Inc., she had completed the company's orientation program and submitted to a background check, then had her fingers pressed into an ink pad.

She hadn't counted on the company's final question: What size pants did she wear?

Grotts, hired as a uniformed guard for an armored car crew at Brink's office in Bartonville, Ill., recalls how managers said they would never have hired her "if we'd known you did not wear pants."

"But it's against my religion," she said. "For them to tell me I can't have the job, I knew that was discrimination."

The disagreement between Brink's and Grotts, a Pentecostal Christian whose religion forbids women to wear pants, might sound isolated. But her case reflects a steady rise in workplace conflicts over religion, one that predated a surge in anti-Muslim incidents since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Worker complaints of religious discrimination made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased more than 20 percent last year, driven by claims of retaliation against Muslims.

But in a much more gradual trend, complaints akin to Grotts' involve a broad range of religions, and have slowly mounted, up 85 percent over the past decade. Such cases make up a very small percentage of overall workplace discrimination complaints, but are rising at a much faster rate.

The increase reflects the growing interjection of religion in the workplace, creating new challenges for employers. The change is in large part because of the nation's increasing religious diversity, but also signals changing expectations by those more openly bringing a religious identity to the job, experts say.

"People look at religion now ... as more central to who they are and they come to work with that religious piece (of themselves)," said Chris Metzler, who directs Cornell University's equal-employment studies program. "9/11 brought more attention to it, but it's not just people who claim to be of Muslim descent. It's also people who practice less conventional religions."

Many employers have adjusted by encouraging employees to tolerate differences and agreeing to requests for adjustments in schedule and dress codes, allowing for holiday decorations or creation of onsite religious affinity groups.

But those efforts have not prevented all conflicts, many of them hinging on federal law requiring employers to make reasonable accommodations for workers' religious beliefs.

Tensions on the rise

In the workplace, religion becomes an increasing source of tension

On the Web

• eeoc.gov
• tanenbaum.org

In a survey of personnel executives last year, 20 percent said their companies had seen worker requests for religious accommodations increase in the past five years. Just 1 percent saw such requests decline, according to the survey by the Society for Human Resource Management and the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding.

About one in five said companies have seen instances of employees proselytizing to co-workers. More than a third of those surveyed said there are more religions represented in their ranks than five years ago.

Those changes may help explain the steady uptick in religious discrimination complaints to the EEOC. The agency fielded 2,572 last year, up from 1,388 complaints in 1992, with a little less than half the increase attributed to complaints by Muslims.

"You have employees of hundreds of different religions in the workplace ... and some employers are not aware of their obligations to make accommodations," said David Grinberg, EEOC spokesman.

The changing environment has lead to uneasy confrontations.

Grotts says she offered to pay for a skirt or other alternative garment made of the same material as Brink's required uniform. But that offer was rejected, and she was fired. The company rehired her two year later, in 1999, after intervention by the EEOC, but laid her off last year, citing economic reasons.

Brink's settled the case by paying Grotts $30,000, covering her attorney's fees and pledging to train all the managers at the office just outside Peoria, Ill., in religious-accommodation requirements.

Other cases are about alleged harassment. The EEOC filed a suit on behalf of Lauren Ellerson, a black former employee at a Victoria's Secret store in suburban Philadelphia last year. The suit charges that workers mocked both Ellerson's race and her Baptist beliefs and supervisors scheduled her to work frequent Sundays after agreeing to keep such shifts to a minimum.

Some conflicts have flared over religious practices that are outside the mainstream.

In a case concluded in 2001, a St. Paul, Minn., postal worker, Robert Hurston, alleged that his co-workers and supervisors harassed him because he practices Wicca. Hurston said many of his co-workers wore crucifixes or clothes with Christian images on them that never drew a second look.

"I'd wear a T-shirt that said 'Born Again Pagan,' on it and I'd be told I couldn't wear that shirt anymore," said Hurston, an electronic technician, who won his case on appeal before the EEOC.

Employers are not used to addressing the wide range of religious practices, said Georgette Bennett, president of the New York-based Tanenbaum Center. The rise of such practices is partly because of an influx of immigrants in recent years. Aging of the population also affects workplace attitudes; researchers find people feel more religious as they get older, Bennett said.

Additionally, the increased politicization of religion means more workers have "become emboldened to assert their religious rights," she said.

Training programs have helped smooth some tensions. But Cornell's Metzler said such efforts, if not well thought out, sometimes come back to bite companies, encouraging people to be open about their personal beliefs without foreseeing a potential backlash.