Juridics USA: Labour & Religion: Bad employer practices by religious orgs and faith-based secularly-tasked agencies
.
New York Times has a blockbuster 6-online-pages article by Diana B. Henriques, "Where Faith Abides, Employees Have Few Rights" (Oct9,2k6) on how religious and faith-based organizations hide behind the First Amendment in court to get away with horrible labour practices.
Judges have routinely invoked the ministerial exception to dismiss lawsuits against religious employers by rabbis, ministers, cantors, nuns and priests — those “whose ministry is a core expression of religious belief for that congregation,” as Mr. McNicholas put it.Henriques goes on to describe in detail one notorious case regarding the firing of a female religious (nun) who was appointed Chaplain at Gannon University, a Roman Catholic institution. She came upon a grievous situaiton in which a senior university official violated sexual harassment rules. She was fired because she pursued the matter (she was a trained lawyer as well). Those are the specifics of one kind of case and we needn't actually bring atittudes toward famale chaplaincy into play in thinking about it. What's important, as Lerner goes on to explain, is the courts' decision-making process, including reversal of the lower court's ruling, and its outcome that proved so negative for good labour-law adjudication in a case where religious factors are among several, but not necessarily the definitive factor in a given case: :
But judges also have applied the exception to dismiss cases filed by the press secretary at a Roman Catholic church, a writer for The Christian Science Monitor, administrators at religious colleges, the disgruntled beneficiaries of a Lutheran pension fund, the overseer of the kosher kitchen at a Jewish nursing home and a co-founder of Focus on the Family, run by the conservative religious leader James C. Dobson. Court files show that some of these people were surprised to learn that their work had been considered a “core expression of religious belief” by their employer.
For four weeks, the prevailing law in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the Virgin Islands — the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — was that “employment discrimination unconnected to religious belief, religious doctrine, or the internal regulations of a church is simply the exercise of intolerance, not the free exercise of religion.”Juridics > labour relaitons
Appellate Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that opinion; his colleague on the three-judge panel, Judge D. Brooks Smith, filed a stinging dissent. A few days later, Judge Becker died. On June 20, in a rare move, the Third Circuit granted Gannon’s routine request to have the case reconsidered and named Judge Smith to the new three-judge panel that would do so.It's important to note that what is being questioned here is not the sphere sovereignty of churches as institutions for the furtherance of faith, but only certain functions of churches, church-related schools, church-related businesses, church-related nursing homes, etc, and faith-based secularly-tasked organizations in regard to their basic employment practices. Being a Christian-identified institution, or a Jewish one, or an Atheist one, or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh or Agnostic or whatever, is not a license to exploit employees, abuse them, sexually harass them, racially discriminate against them. NOr is it a license for employees to break rules of decorum, attire, appropriate language, etc.
On Sept. 6, the new panel swept the earlier decision away, unequivocally restoring the protections for religious employers that it had put in doubt. As Judge Smith put it, the ministerial exception “applies to any claim, the resolution of which would limit a religious institution’s right to choose who will perform particular spiritual functions.”
North America > USA
1.) Not being questioned here are legistlative exceptions made exempting small businesses with few employees (the employer can let you go, just because he doesn't like you or your attitude or your religion, I guess). It's similar to legislative exceptions made for small-sized living accomodations, as in the case of a landlord who rents rooms in his/her own home. The landlord in many jurisdictions gets the benefit of the doubt because the tenants are accomodated in his own home.
2.) Not being questioned here are the r+ts of faith-based agencies to hire within the faith (but without discrimination among the faithful in regard to race or other prohbited bases of discrimination).
3.) What is being affirmed here is the fundamental r+t of association in employment, which includes the r+t to belong to a labour union (even if the union in which one's membership is held is not certified for the given bargaining unit or workforce, one has the r+t to have the union of one's choice recognized as a religio-ethical and/or philosophical identity that registers the worker in solidarity with those of the same principled commitment for labour relations). In North America and English-speaking countries like Britain and Australia, the concept of representation is quite underdeveloped in the workaday world, and often people are often forced to belong to unions inimical to their beliefs, even basic beliefs. The totalitarian aspect of either not having any labour spokes-institution at all, or being forced into a union because one is in the minority in a winner-takes-all representation vote escapes the addled brain of most in our society.
There are unions in North American that are constrained by the same totalitarian setup in labour-relations law, but which do not practice forced membership even when they obtain a majority of workers to get certification, and do not practice checkoff of dues of nonmembers in workforces where they constitute a majority. Nonmembers are allowed to give the equivalent of dues to a general charity, thus not freeloading on the benefits that the majority-union secures. The Christian Labour Association of the USA (CLA-USA) and the Christian Labour Union of Canada (CLAC) are two such principled religio-ethical labour movements--which welcome members of all faiths, races, and national origins--but hold to and advance a markedly different philosophy of work than do the totalitarian unions of the labour mainstream on our continent.
-- Owlb
Further Info:
No comments:
Post a Comment