Pronouns confuse me. It's not that I want to misgender anyone. In fact, quite to the contrary, I try really hard to get people's pronouns correct when addressing them or speaking about them. To me, it's a simple matter of common decency. My efforts to get them correct, however, doesn't mean that they still don't confuse me. When I grew up, I learned that "they" refers to a group of people. Thus, when someone refers to someone else as "they," my brains says, "more than one." It's just difficult, but I still try to get it right.
Monday, December 19, 2022
Your religion isn’t a license to discriminate (but we may need to accommodate you anyway)
Pronouns confuse me. It's not that I want to misgender anyone. In fact, quite to the contrary, I try really hard to get people's pronouns correct when addressing them or speaking about them. To me, it's a simple matter of common decency. My efforts to get them correct, however, doesn't mean that they still don't confuse me. When I grew up, I learned that "they" refers to a group of people. Thus, when someone refers to someone else as "they," my brains says, "more than one." It's just difficult, but I still try to get it right.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Is God anti-union?
Thomas Ross, a security officer employed by Allied Universal in San Francisco, has filed a discrimination charge with the EEOC against Service Employees International Union officials and his employer for forcing him to join and financially support the union after he told both that his religious beliefs forbid union support.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Tuesday, July 5, 2022
Forced religion and work do not mix
I believe that everyone's relationship with God (whether you call that deity God, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Vishnu, Buddha, something else, or nothing at all) is personal. I have no opinion on your spiritual relationship, as should you have none on mine. Thus, I get mad whenever someone tries to shove their religious beliefs down my throat. Not only do I not care, but I can guarantee that you will not change my mind. Proselytism is one small step removed from fanaticism, and rarely, if ever, has anything good come from religious fanaticism.
I share the above as prologue to today's discussion, which focuses on a Title VII lawsuit the EEOC recently filed against Aurora Pro Services, a North Carolina residential home service and repair company, alleged to have required employees to participate in religious prayer sessions as a condition of employment.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Monday, June 13, 2022
LGBTQ+ rights vs. religious liberty
"It's an abomination to God. Rainbow is not meant to be displayed as a sign for sexual gender."
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Accountability always starts at the top
How do you respond to an employee who states that the Covid-19 vaccine is a plot by "the Jews" to exterminate people? Does your answer change if the employee in question is the company's founder?
The scenario recently played out at Entrata, a Utah technology company. David Bateman, Entrata's founder, sent an email to multiple parties, including various Utah tech leaders. Bateman's email started with the subject line, "Genocide." It went downhill from there.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, November 11, 2021
Coronavirus Update 11-11-2021: Religious groups tell 5th Circuit that the OSHA vaccine mandate is a “sin against God"
In a filing made with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the petition seeking to strike down OSHA's "vaccine or test" emergency temporary standard, the American Family Association and Word of God Fellowship (which does business as Daystar Television Network) told the court that imposing the mandate on religious employees would be a "sin against God." (For the record, the AFA also believes that climate change is a hoax because only God can control the climate and stands firm against legal protection for LGBT rights. But I digress.)
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Coronavirus Update 11-10-2021: Federal judge grants injunction victory to United on its vaccine mandates, but signals that this war is far from over
A U.S. federal district court judge ruled that an employer can impose on its employees a Covid-19 vaccine mandate that provides unpaid leave as the only reasonable accommodation for medical or religious reasons.
The case, Sambrano v. United Airlines, was seen as a test case for the viability of unpaid leave as a reasonable accommodation to vaccine mandates. The order denied the plaintiffs their requested preliminary injunction. Yet, it's not that aspect of the case that's the most noteworthy. Instead, it's the critical words that the judge saved for United's apparent cavalier and callous attitude against religious accommodations as a whole to which employers should pay the most attention.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, October 28, 2021
Coronavirus Update 10-28-2021: EEOC publishes its own internal Religious Accommodation Request form
"Jon, we have so many employees asking us for religious accommodations from our workplace Covid rules, including our vaccine mandate. Do you have a form we can use to document the request?"
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, August 19, 2021
Coronavirus Update 8-19-2021: The (Un)Healthy American, along with other more reputable organizations, help Americans dodge vaccine mandates
Meet Peggy Hall. She runs a website called The Healthy American.
What is The Healthy American? For starters, it's a website that NewsGuard ranks 22.5/100 (a failing grade no matter how you slice it), for, among other sins and errors, publishing false and irresponsible misinformation about the Covid vaccine.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Coronavirus Update 8–10–2021: Vaccines and religions accommodation requests
"I need an accommodation for your mandatory vaccination policy. The vaccine is against my religion."
As more employers roll out vaccine mandates, more will be faced with this exact scenario.
Title VII requires an employer to reasonably accommodate an employee's sincerely held religious beliefs, practices, or observances, as long as the accommodation does not impose an undue hardship.
Two, and only two, religions, however, actually support people not getting vaccinated as a tenet of the religion — Christian Scientists and the Dutch Reformed Church. There are an estimated 106,000 Christian Scientists in the United States, and 194,000 members of the Reformed Church. That's a tidy total of 300,000 potential religious objectors based on their religion's actual teachings, period (or only 0.25% of all employees). But that minuscule number does not end the inquiry.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, July 8, 2021
Religious accommodations shouldn’t flummox employers, yet they still do
I've shared this story before, but it's worth re-sharing because (a) it's been a few years and I have many new readers, (b) it's really good, and (c) because it's super relevant to today's lesson.
I spent a high-school summer working on a warehouse loading dock. One of my co-workers was named Harland Jester. (I provide his name because he named his son "Court," and this context provides the necessary color for the rest of the story.)Four days into my summer job, a co-worker pulled me aside and asked, "Did Harland get a hold of you yet?"
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, April 8, 2021
Title VII and “fringe" religions
"A pagan says she faced religious discrimination while working at Panera. Now, she’s suing." So reads the headline at the Washington Post. The plaintiff claims that after she told an assistant manager that she was pagan, her hours were cut and she was told they wouldn't be restored until she "found God" (in addition to other alleged workplace harassment).
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Tuesday, September 22, 2020
“Religious freedom” ≠ freedom to discriminate (but sometimes it must be accommodated anyway)

For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, January 30, 2020
Does Title VII protect “veganism” as a religion?
A judge in the United Kingdom has ruled that “ethical veganism” is a protected class akin to religion and is protected from workplace discrimination. The Washington Post shares the details:
An employment tribunal made that landmark determination in a case involving a man who claimed he was fired from his job at an animal rights organization for revealing to colleagues that their pension funds were invested in companies that experiment on animals. The tribunal has yet to rule on the merits of the case, but it did on Friday take the step of deciding that the man’s ethical veganism constitutes a “philosophical and religious belief” protected by anti-discrimination law.
That’s the United Kingdom. What about the United States? Well, it depends.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, November 21, 2019
“Hairstyle discrimination” laws: a solution in search of a problem
I fully embrace the irony of a local news broadcast holding me out as the expert on hair discrimination. 👨🏻🦲
Irony notwithstanding, here I am on last night’s 6 o’clock news discussing why we don’t need to ban workplace hairstyle discrimination. (Big thank you to WEWS’s Mike Brookbank for reaching out and for the interview.)
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, August 1, 2019
When an employee’s religion clashes with an employer’s dress code
The case, Boyd v. Cooper University Hospital, is pending in federal court in New Jersey. While it’s just filed, and years from resolution, we can use it to learn how an employer should react when a employee dons religious garb in the workplace.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Tuesday, June 4, 2019
Proposed law wants to convert “anti-vaxxer” into a protected class
With a couple of important exceptions, an employer can require that employees be up to date on their vaccinations.
The exceptions?
1/ An employee with an ADA disability that prevents him or her from receiving a vaccine may be entitled to an exemption from a mandatory vaccination requirement as a reasonable accommodation.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Thursday, January 17, 2019
An expensive lesson on religious accommodations

For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Wednesday, October 31, 2018
When you employ a Satanist #HappyHalloween

Rosemary's Baby, the classic 1968 horror film, tells the story of a pregnant woman who (spoiler alert: correctly) assumes that a satanic cult wants her baby. What does Rosemary's Baby have to do with employment law?
In honor of Halloween, I bring you the story of Irving Cortez-Hernandez, a "Catholic-Satanist" who prayed to the Devil for his pregnant co-worker to miscarry, and as a result lost both his job and his religious discrimination lawsuit.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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Monday, October 29, 2018
Anti-Semitism at work

The reality is that anti-Semitism never went away. It has always been there, bubbling under the surface. The current climate in our country, however, has given it permission to boil over.
For more information, contact Jon at (440) 695-8044 or JHyman@Wickenslaw.com.
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