EEOC Sues Frito-Lay for Religious Discrimination

US Equal Opportunity Commission ^ | 9/17/20

[marshmallow]

Snack Food Giant Fired Seventh-day Adventist Sales Representative After He Refused to Train on Saturdays Due to His Religious Beliefs, Federal Agency Charges

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Frito-Lay, Inc., a Plano, Texas-based subsidiary of PepsiCo that manufactures and distributes snack foods, violated federal law when it fired a newly promoted route sales representative because he could not train for the position on Saturdays due to his religious beliefs, the U.S. Equal Employ­ment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today.

According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, a West Palm Beach Frito-Lay warehouse employee applied for and received a promotion to route sales representative. The employee completed approximately five weeks of training without having to train on Saturdays. However, despite learning he could not work on Saturdays be­cause of his Seventh-day Adventist religious beliefs, Frito-Lay sched­uled him to train on Saturdays and terminated him after he failed to report to training on two consecutive Saturdays.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on religion and requires employers to reasonably accommodate an applicant’s or employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs unless it would pose an undue hardship. The EEOC filed its lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach Division (EEOC v. Frito-Lay, Inc., Civil Action No. 9:20-cv-81689), after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process. The EEOC seeks back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages, as well as injunctive relief.

“An employer is obligated to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs, for example, by providing a schedule change, when it would cause no undue hardship,” said EEOC regional attorney Robert Weisberg. “For an employer to only schedule the worker to work on Saturdays when it knows he cannot due to his religious beliefs violates fed­eral law.”

[Vendome]

What a martyr.

I’m sure he’s missed plenty of Saturday’s at his place of worship...

[who_would_fardels_bear]

You can’t have a seven layer dip without the sixth layer.

[peggybac]

I work for a Seventh Day Adventist company. They’re really strict about who can work on Saturdays. Only absolutely essential employees are allowed to work.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

The man will now own the company.

The EEOC is now actually working for the “people”, not some of the people.

[Paul R.]

What does the Frito Bandito think of this?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Have run into this many times. You can not make an employee do something that violates their religious beliefs. You have to make reasonable accommodations. In this case it sounds like they could have trained him on another day but chose not to just to be jerks.

That has consequences.

Had one employee who was Jewish who could not work from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. His supervisor gave him a rough time about it and it was my job to try to find a compromise.

I asked him if the employee could work Sunday instead. I knew that was a hard day to schedule. The supervisor just about had a conniption fit. He was not going to ask someone to work on the Sabbath.

I had the poor guy transferred to a work crew that was not headed by someone with rocks in their head.