Archive for the ‘discrimination’ Category
Can Employers Tell Employees What to Eat?
Filed under: discrimination, employees, ethics, food, values |
Comments (33) 
All companies want their employees to be team players. But just how far can companies go in requiring that employees ‘toe the line’? Can that demand extend to cultural or religious or moral or dietary requirements?
How As a starting point, consider this story, from CBC News: No meat on menu for Montreal purse maker
A Montreal accessories company has taken its policy of using no animal products beyond the rack and has forbidden its staff from eating meat and fish at work.
A former employee says the policy violated her rights as a non-vegetarian….
(I’ve blogged on unusual forms of employee discrimination before. See Discriminating Against the Non-Blind and “Smokers Need Not Apply”.)
So, is it OK for a company to require that its employees not eat meat? Now, to be more precise, the company in question isn’t forcing people to be vegetarians. It’s just insisting that they not eat meat on the premises. But still, the requirement is an imposition. If an employee loves bologna sandwiches, why should she not be allowed to eat them on her lunch break at work? On the other hand, it’s not exactly a brutal requirement: a place that forbids employees from eating meat is not exactly ipso facto a Dickensian sweatshop. Of course, you might say that the whole conflict could be avoided by careful hiring: only hire people who are willing to uphold the company ethos. But that still amounts to a form of discrimination — and we would still have to ask whether such discrimination is justified or not. Besides, we would still have to worry about cases in which an employee is a devout vegetarian at time of hiring, but then (for whatever reason) changes her dietary habits at some point after being hired.
Whatever your instincts about this particular case, it’s worth performing a consistency test on your own conclusion. Try this: if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, and sympathetic to the company’s no-meat policy, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the tables were turned, and a meat-packing company required employees to eat meat and forbade vegetarianism. (“Why would a vegetarian work at a meat-packing plant?” Well, times are tough. Stranger things have happened!) If, on the other hand, you think the company in the story above is engaging in unjustifiable discrimination, ask yourself whether you would reach the same conclusion if the company was one whose product embodied some value that you hold dear — something to do with your own religious or philosophical or political beliefs. That kind of consistency test is a good way to double-check that the conclusion you reach with regard to this particular case is rooted in good reasons, or whether instead your conclusion is based on an undefended bias.
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Addendum:
A couple of people have told me my counter-example above is unrealistic — after all, what employer is going to tell you you have to eat meat? That misses the point I was making, which was to suggest to people that we should think up some counter-example that involves some set of values that would challenge what seems to us to be the “obvious” conclusion, here. If you don’t like my example, feel free to suggest one!
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Thanks to NW for the story.
Discriminating Against the Non-Blind
Discrimination takes many forms, many of them hurtful and insidious. But discrimination is not always bad: in the broadest sense of the term, it just means to tell different things apart. But of course usually when we use the term, we’re referring to illegitimate discrimination, aimed at persons, based on irrelevant characteristics. For most purposes, discriminating based on race, sex, sexual orientation or physical characteristics is wrong. But even there, there are exceptions. Being able to see, for example, is a genuine necessity (what lawyers call a bona fide job requirement) if you’re a pilot. Could being unable to see ever be a bona fide job requirement. That’s a question recently faced by the Canadian charitable foundation known as CNIB (formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind).
Here’s the story, from the Toronto Star: Debate stirs over hiring of sighted CNIB head
When John Rafferty looks out the window of his modest third-floor corner office at CNIB’s Bayview Ave. headquarters, he can see the trees of a wooded ravine.
This is why an advocacy group calls his hiring “a step backward.”
This is why he speaks of “my unique challenges” and “taking time to understand” and being “extra careful.” This is why the leader of another charity says a genial man with a sterling resumé who left a lucrative private-sector job to occupy this corner office would, “in a perfect world,” be somewhere else.
This is John Rafferty’s burden. He can see. Rafferty’s predecessor, Jim Sanders, was blind. So was his predecessor, so was his predecessor, and so was every top executive in the 91-year history of CNIB, formerly the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Rafferty, 43, is its first “sighted” president and CEO.
Summarizing briefly: there’s debate within the blind community (and in particular among various charities that work on behalf of the visually impaired) about whether being visually impaired is a bona fide job requirement to head up an organization like CNIB.
It’s interesting (and perhaps good) to see that there’s a healthy debate over this issue within the community. On one hand, everyone wants CNIB to do well, and doing well means having the very best leadership possible. If Rafferty is as good as CNIB’s hiring committee thinks he is, he could do a lot of good for the organization and the people it serves. Then again, it’s very difficult to measure (especially from the outside) the symbolic value of an organization having a leader who shares a crucial characteristic with the people it serves.
(p.s., Note the interesting similarities & dissimilarities between the story above and the one in this blog posting from January: “Smokers Need Not Apply”, about a job posting by an anti-smoking organization.)
No Cake for Little Hitler: Ethics in the Bakery
Filed under: decision-making, discrimination, ethics, retail, values |
Comments (4) 
Freedom is a wonderful thing; freedom of speech is particularly important. But speech can also be a potent weapon. Your way of expressing yourself might prove horrific to me. Given that lot of businesses make all or part of their livelihood from helping people express themselves, challenges are bound to arise. Case in point, from The Lehigh Valley Express-Times: Holland Township family angry that supermarket won’t personalize cake for their son
JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell and Adolf Hitler Campbell.
Good names for a trio of toddlers? Heath and Deborah Campbell think so. The Holland Township couple has picked those names and the oldest child, Adolf Hitler Campbell, turns 3 today.
This has given rise to a problem, because the ShopRite supermarket in Greenwich Township has refused to make a cake for young Adolf’s birthday.
“We believe the request … to inscribe a birthday wish to Adolf Hitler is inappropriate,” said Karen Meleta, a ShopRite spokeswoman.
The Campbells turned down the market’s offer to make a cake with enough room for them to write their own inscription and can’t understand what all of the fuss is about.
Here’s an earlier, longer version of the story: Holland Township man names son after Adolf Hitler
ShopRite is within its rights to refuse to make the cake. They certainly have no obligation to help the Campbells live out their probably-hateful or at-least-misguided lifestyle. (Note: I’m willing to soften the case against these parents because, based on reading the longer version of the story — they seem dim-witted, not evil. Whatever.)
So, it was at least OK, and perhaps ethically a good thing, to refuse to make the cake. Of course, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of tacky, tasteless things someone would want to have written on a cake (“Happy Birthday, Assh*le!” or “Show Me Your T*ts!). I can imagine borderline cases that would give bakery managers headaches. But a cake paying apparent homage to the 20th Century’s literal poster boy for evil is probably not a borderline case.
Not surprisingly, different stores have different standards. Apparently the local Wal-Mart made little Adolf’s first two birthday cakes:
A spokeswoman for Wal-Mart said the store won’t put anything illegal or profane on a cake but thinks it’s important to respect the views of customers and employees.
The Wal-Mart spokesperson’s premise is a little off, here: you don’t need to respect all views of your customers and employees. A healthy degree of respect for cultural and religious differences is a good thing, but not all views are worthy of respect. So I don’t think a store needs to be willing to make Nazi cakes in order to show its support for diversity. But while I think what ShopRight did in refusing to make that cake was perfectly fine, I’m not sure there’s anything badly wrong with another store going ahead and making the cake. It is, after all, the kid’s name, and by making the cake the store would be pretty far from promoting Nazism. In a free society — and a free market — we probably want to allow merchants a reasonable degree of leeway in the customer preferences they are willing to tolerate.
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