Muslim Workers Fired From Denver Meat Packaging Company For Prayer ‘Walk-Off’

About 190 workers, a lot of them immigrants from Somalia, have been fired from a Colorado meat packing plant after walking off the job during a dispute over workplace prayer.

They allege that bosses at Cargill Meat Solutions won’t allow them to pray. “They wanted to talk to management and they were told to go home if they wanted to pray”.

Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Human Rights Commission, said the plant managers may have misunderstood the fact that Muslims are required to pray at different times during the day depending on the season. Back in 2011, Cargill spokesman Michael Martin released a statement citing the company’s legal obligation regarding religion, and how hard it would be to shut down production each day to accommodate prayer requests for Muslim workers.

The employees involved have retained the Council on American-Islamic Relations to represent them in the matter.

Cargill responded to the firing by saying that the company “makes every reasonable attempt to provide religious accommodation to all employees based on our ability to do so without disruption to our beef processing business at Fort Morgan”. Company leaders told the newspaper they’ve tried to accommodate their Muslim employees, who comprise about a tenth of the workforce: The prayer room is separated into two areas, one for men and one for women, in accordance with Islamic edicts.

It was at that point and due to that policy that Cargill made a decision to terminate about 190 people, Cargill says.

After the December 18 second shift, 10 of those workers who went to pray submitted their resignations, Martin said.

A teleconference is scheduled next week between CAIR and Cargill about the issue.

He said company policies had not changed.

Hussein said company officials told him the mass dismissal was over a “no call, no-show, walk out”. “This has been clearly communicated to all employees”, Martin said.

He did add that accommodation is not guaranteed every day and is dependent on a number of work-related factors which can – and do – change from day to day.

But Hussein maintained that the workers believed that the policy regarding prayer had effectively changed. “The time was carved out of a 15-minute break period or from the workers” unpaid 30-minute lunch breaks. “It’s like losing a blessing from God”.

Inside a shop in Fort Morgan, Khader Ducaale works diligently filing unemployment claims.

Before the walkout, Cargill employed roughly 600 Somali workers at the Fort Morgan plant.

Founded in 1865, Cargill employs 155,000 people in 68 countries and is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue, according to its website.