Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

There are times one should accommodate the religion of someone in their employment. I'll let the labor law types figure out the extent to which this ought to mean legal protection and how much this just means not being a dick to people who work for you (there are more deserving people to be a dick to). For example, firing someone for observing Easter or Yom Kippur is a dick move.

But not serving alcohol as a flight attendant, not serving people who want to get married as a town clerk, or refusing cake or pizza on someone's wedding day? These are people who are just being dicks themselves.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

A dick move? Sure. But should it be illegal? I'd say no, and it's a whole lot easier to accommodate than is refusing to serve alcohol or issue licenses.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

A lot of stuff in the employment area becomes illegal because too many people behave like dicks if we don't. I don't see a principled distinction here, just a practical one, weighing the burdens of regulation on all the decent people against the need to deflate the dicks.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

That's pretty good.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Ridiculous. You know the job. Don't do it if your religion says you can't perform aspects of it.

I'm sick of all this religious accommodation bullshit.

TM

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

No. We never get to a weighing analysis unless we first decide that religion -- religious practices, preferences, prohibitions, or some or all of same -- are legally deserving of a reasonable accommodation. Only then do you weigh the burden or making an accommodation.

And while giving someone the day off for Yom Kippur may seem reasonable in all circumstances, I don't agree that it is. First, if someone demanded Christmas off when we had a trial on December 27, I would say no, and I would mean it. Second, you pretty quickly get to a need to give several holidays, or all Friday afternoons off for prayer, or Sundays for church....

But, most of all, fuck that. People with real jobs lose them because they don't want to work on Thanksgiving or New Year's Day. I don't see a need to elevate religious observance days to a special status here.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

This would have been a more succinct way to say what I said above.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Wait, Thanksgiving and New Year's Day are religious holidays? Is this more football stuff?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I can't tell if you are joking or being serious.

If serious, I'll say two things:

1. Try to reserve your dickish outbursts for discussions with TM.

2. My point, which I thought was pretty obvious, was that if Walmart can fire someone for refusing to work on Thanksgiving, why should they be legally barred from firing someone for refusing to work on Yom Kippur, Easter, or any other day that some religious regards as a holiday?

If joking, I'll say this:

That was funny.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I was joking. Football didn't give it away?

I generally wouldn't start criminalizing making people work on religious holidays as a matter of course. As I said earlier, I thought I'd leave to others the question of whether behavior was dickish or illegal, but, hey, we are already into it, so why not.

If law firm of Brahman & Forbes, run by good old-school New England Calvinists, had a policy of giving people X days of PTO and as a matter of course denied people the ability to use those days on Yom Kippur but let people use them on Good Friday, Brahman & Forbes would not want me on the jury. And if there were a whole lot of Brahman & Forbes' in a given city who did this regularly, and I were king, I'd think about legislation that would make it illegal.

Yes, businesses may need people to work holidays. I work many holidays. Dammit, this year I worked on both Easter and Eid. If Walmart is open, they're going to need workers. But it's an area where it's perfectly reasonable for people to ask for a little accommodation and for businesses to try to be flexible in response, not like the airplane or town clerk where management is entitled to just be pissed.

Luckily, we live in a country where people would never discriminate against religious minorities. (Religious majorities, of course, may be another matter.)

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

my first firm was the old time "Jewish" patent boutique. My first yom kippur the goyim CEO took all of us who came to work out to lunch on the firm, he goes "of course this is fair, these Jewish guys ain't working Christmas."

Which does seem a valid point, sort of?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I'm looking to celebrate all religious holidays myself.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I doubt you would need such legislation. That seems like straight-up discrimination based on religion, and already actionable. Which is why the firm would have to worry about you being on the jury -- they don't generally convene juries when stuff isn't actionable.

It is not illegal for me to assign really shitty tasks to junior lawyers (thank god). But if I routinely assign the shitty tasks to black lawyers, while giving white lawyers only the really cool and interesting tasks that junior lawyers do (whatever those are).... well, you get the point.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Of course, for most large firms, the "Brady Rule" applies here. It's not whether or not they discriminate that's at issue, it's whether you can catch them.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

Very few jobs face this kind of urgency, and the ones that do are generally exempt from most forms of labor regulation, aren't they?

Ah, the slippery slope. Except you almost certainly already do accommodate for these things without even thinking about it. Most of what we do that's not happening on government time can be pretty easily moved around.

If they work for assholes, I guess. Thankfully, everywhere I've ever worked had people that also did not want to work on Thanksgiving or New Year's Day and only did so if truly necessary and did not expect anything else of others.

ETA: I initially read "real jobs" to mean "jobs like ours," but perhaps that's not what you meant. If you meant actual real jobs - i.e., not white collar professional ones - then yeah, people with real jobs get fired for refusing to work when assigned.