30 Muslims Fired For Praying On The Job At Dell

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Work or pray.

Faced with that difficult decision, Abdi H. Nuur removed his employee badge and walked away last month from his forklift driver's job at Dell Computer's Nashville plant. He and 29 other Somali Muslims say they were forced to choose between their faith and their employment.

Now the Metro Human Relations Commission is trying to intervene in a confrontation that pits American-style production quotas against Islam's requirement that its adherents pray daily when the sun sets.

''They told us that we cannot pray at sunset,'' Nuur said. ''They told us that we would have to wait for our break.''

He said he explained that while some of Islam's five daily prayer times are somewhat flexible, the sunset prayer is not. Nor does the sun set at the same time every day.

Big employers in the Nashville area have responded in drastically different ways to their Muslim employees' requests to slip away from their workstations for about five minutes to pray.

For example, Whirlpool Corp. chose last year to take a similar dispute before a federal jury, which agreed with the company that the employees' sunset-prayer request created an undue hardship on the La Vergne plant's production schedule.

According to leaders of Nashville's Somali community, Dell has been one of several area employers with strong histories of accommodating Muslim workers.

But that arrangement apparently came to an abrupt halt in February, with the firing of 30 workers. They were employed by Spherion, a labor agency that provides workers for Dell's Nashville operations, according to David Perez, the compliance officer for the Metro Human Relations Commission.

http://tennessean.com/local/archives/05/03/66733769.shtml?Element_ID=66733769

Or will they remain silent and thus expose their vile hypocrisy?

For what it's worth, I'm an atheist, but this is just wrong. If these people want to pray at work, they should be allowed to as long as it's not interfering w/ anyone else or their job performance.

Can you imagine the insane fight that would ensue if these people were xtians?

I'll bet a dollar that the total minutes spent outside smoking exceeds the prayer time.

Do they never let people leave the line to take a 5 minute bathroom break either?

where they moved most of ther customer support.

who are Muslims. The company has a "personal needs" room set up for those who need to use it. They are free to go there for prayer. No one objects. That's the whole purpose of the room. They don't take a LONG time, they just do what they need to do and return to work. No one even notices. It's part of life.

I wonder.

they can let these folks take a few minutes to pray at sunset.

Seriously!

I see no difference (and I'm not trying to bust on smokers here). I have co-workers who smoke and they get a 5-10 minute break a few times a day to endulge in their habit. Shouldn't these Muslims have the same right for a 5-10 break a few times a day to endulge in their prayers?

Boy, somebody's sure scared shitless of the Chinese, ain't they?