I find stories like this one reported in the Denver Post endlessly frustrating:
About 190 workers, most of them immigrants from Somalia, have been fired from a meat packing and distribution plant on Colorado’s Eastern Plains for walking off the job to protest a workplace prayer dispute.
Ten days ago more than 200 workers walked off their jobs at Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan.
Some workers later returned, but the majority stayed away as representatives of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) negotiated on their behalf.
It seems to me that this is covered rather neatly by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and there’s a lot of case law that would support an action by the discharged workers. Employers are obligated to make reasonable accommodations for the religious obligations of their employees.
This also illustrates the point I was trying to make (rather clumsily I’m afraid) in this earlier post. Whatever the context and whatever the final outcome, this will be cited forever more as an illustration that Americans are anti-Muslim and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Why are we importing workers from Somalia?
Hey, did you see the story about the indentured goatherders?
We aren’t. We’re taking in Somali refugees. In the meatpacking industry in the upper Midwest they have substantially supplanted the Mexicans who supplanted the Germans and Swedes who’d been cutting meat there previously.
Those used to be good, decent middle income jobs. Not so much any more.
The refugee program is just another scam for importing cheap labor.
The Cargill meatpacking plant nearest me (45 miles away) recruits Francophone Africans for labor through the diversity visas. There may be some refugees, but I think these are just lottery winners, with a lot of highly educated professionals in the mix. Before that they relied on less-educated Mexicans with relatives in the U.S. I think the issue from Cargill’s perspective was turnover — the locals would no longer stay in the small town, the Mexicans would stay longer, but were not really committed to staying in the U.S. and attracted illegal immigrants and INS inspections, and the West Africans plan to stay in the U.S. and become citizens if possible, but I suspect that the doctors, lawyers and engineers may not want to be meat-packers that much longer.
(Its a pork-plant, so maybe Somalis aren’t such a good idea)