I figured someone from Australia would have coughed up some legal analysis by now
You really dislike that term, "the West", don't you? You do realise that one of the more prominent religions (whch includes prayer) over the past thousand years has been "Western", yes? How could "the West" be against prayer?
You really need to stop mucking about in the sewers, Adam.
The word "rejection" is modified by the adjective "Western". The form of the rejection is very Western. It's shortsighted and narrowly-focused, traditionally Western in such manners.
Again, thanks. So what exactly must they account for? Which personal practices of which employees must be catered for by an employer, and which are ignored? 24601 can take some time off in the middle of the day to pray, and work late; but 24602 can't play trombone in the office from 2pm to 3pm, and then work an hour later? Why? How can you say that 24601's personal activities are more important than 24602's?
If you didn't write such idiot-simple examples, I would be challenged and not annoyed by this kind of discussion.
24601 can take ten minutes off. 24602 can take an hour off if it doesn't affect production. And 24602 can play the trombone all he wants. Now consider that prayer is a private thing that generally doesn't disturb one's neighbors--dancing naked in the cafeteria notwithstanding--so if 24602 can find a decent place to play his trombone where he isn't interrupting the workflow, yes, he can. At my job, I could have gotten away with it.
In the long run, it's trial and error, and the employer in the topic article seems to be under the burden of explaining this solution. Perhaps Australian labor laws will give them that leverage.
Again, you draw distinctions based on the times of breaks, the personal activities involved, and the job in question. So tell me, how do you decide which person can do what, and when? Surely all their personal activities must be valid at the office if any are.
Yes, masturbation comes to mind. As long as the employees wipe up afterward?
It's a bit of a stretch to cover all personal activities. But in terms of Australian law, let's start here:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.
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Constitution of Australia, sec. 116
Now, how does that play out with labor laws?
While I'm all for principles, it's well enough to look at the law, isn't it? The whole situation can be wrapped up easily once the legal grounds for the employer's actions are identified.
As I said prior to your last piece of grandstanding, I agree. If all employees can fit into those three rules, I'd have no problems with it.
And I think considerations of time fall under the heading of
Do not break production. If the time commitment can be shown to be an unreasonable interruption of production, then the employer has grounds to refuse that accommodation. However, in hiring a Muslim, if one does not consider the conflicts of time and duty of production, that's the employer's fault. How is the Muslim supposed to know? He or she is applying for a job thinking they are capable of performing it. If the employer withholds a circumstance that contradicts this condition, that's their own fault, it seems.
Why hire a guy to a job you can't properly leave him at?
Any hardware manufacturer or software disc printer. I mean any such place, above the very small limited run outfits. Aassembly lines for chips run all the time. If it's his job to monitor the dyes, and he takes ten minutes out which he will work on later, there are still ten minutes of potentially faulty chips he has completely ignored. That's hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands, every time he takes a prayer break.
And if an employer knowingly hires a Muslim to that position, how is it the Muslim's fault?
And thank
you.
I'm against anyone or any group, which takes advantage of today's climate of caving in to political correctness to soak up as much advantage as they can.
But you're not establishing that advantage, and frequently you fail to.
We have the same difficulty in the US. For instance, our "homosexual rights" disputes. On one side are people who don't want to see homosexuals taking advantage of civil rights. But nobody can tell me how being free from job, housing, legal, educational, or other discrimination is taking advantage of the situation.
When someone establishes that deliberate seizing of advantage, then there's an issue to consider. But you're not convincing me here.
I really don't care if they are white, black, christian, muslim, atheist, NRA, Black Panthers, George Bush, or any other idiot.
Actually, you do, as demonstrated by your position in this topic. Being a Muslim, unlike being an atheist, is more than just a label.
If they want special treament above and beyond what the majority can expect, simply for existing, rather than for any meritorious service, they can get stuffed.
Demonstrate how the right to pray is special treatment? You have the right to pray. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean you should or can take it away from others. I have the right to own a firearm, but I don't. And I would hope that I could find better reasons for disliking the presence of firearms than the mere fact that I don't own and use one.
If they don't want special treatment, I'm fine with them
That's good. I won't argue with that.
Bigoted? Maybe against the greedy and corrupt, but that's all. But apart from the greedy and corrupt, please identify any group which I am bigoted against.
The religious, for instance. Your picture of them is stained by your prejudices to the point that you support your opinion with wild, unfounded projections.
Or we could look at protesters. You seem to have a serious problem with them, and unfairly assign them the burden of forsaking their rights to assembly. And, as we see in that topic, you're staking your opinion of protesters on the actions of some pretty stupid Australian protesters.
Any standard for working conditions must apply to all members of a society, else it is injust.
Which means that in order for Section 116 of the Australian Constitution to (A) be preserved, and (B) be fair, all religions must necessarily become the same?
The right is to religious observance. Within limits, that right is to be accommodated. (E.g.--virgin sacrifice is out of the question for reasons discussed in other posts, such as harming people.) Everyone, it seems, has a right to pray. Some need more time than others, and some choose to not employ that right at all.
This means that even someone working on a chip printing line must be able to have those breaks, which could disrupt business substantially.
In the US, job applications, as a matter of course, ask about potential scheduling conflicts. If, after these considerations, someone hires a Muslim to a job that that hiring agent knew could not afford that accommodation, it seems to me that the hiring agent is the one who has to figure out what to do, and punishing the Muslim is not the proper option.
I only know the USA's public health system is crap, and would think that is the standard by which you would judge the value of other hospitals.
And that's fair enough. And while we're looking at our causes for dispute and acrimony, might I point out that I wrote,
Some of the best care you can get in the US is at Catholic hospitals. In this instance, I don't see why you're relying on the public standard as your basis of judgment when it's already acknowledged to be below that of the hospitals in question.
That surprises you? There are doctors all over your country assisting in suicides. Some steal drugs from the pharmacies and sell them to illegal suppliers.
What does this have to do with anything? You brought up the example of a doctor who refuses a lifesaving procedure on religious grounds. Religious grounds have almost nothing to do with it; it's a matter of being a doctor.
As to assisted suicide, doctors do have a course for mercy. If one is terminally ill and chooses to refuse further treatment against the disease, a doctor is within his or her rights to reduce suffering.
But they may allow people to be harmed, or to die? Such as those chaps who don't allow their kids to have medical treatment?
Yep. But it is a patient's right to refuse treatment, and in the US, parents speak for their children; our children are not afforded their Constitutional rights.
Again, you demonstrate inconsistency. Is a biological connection the requirement you set for giving them paid time away from work? What about those who adopt babies?
Fair enough. Strike the word "biological". The point being that the nuclear family is of certain importance among humans. The
parents, who have the greatest responsibility to the child, in this case, have the greatest need. This as opposed to the sister, as the example goes. But lacking any other family, yes, it does work that way. My mother received the same emergency family leave to attend to her dying mother.
What about any number of circumstances in which people not related to the infant by blood are the ones who must look after the baby in its first months?
Such as? Those people are usually
paid to look after the child.
Again, the rule must be made available to brothers, sisters, cousins, nannies, anyone at all who may be called upon to look after the kid at any time.
Okay, in the US, a nanny is a paid station; it's a hired caretaker like Mary Poppins, but without the singing and dancing and flying and alternate-universe and supercalifragilistic prerequisites. That's why I keep pinging that word. As to family members, if they are by nature of succession a primary caretaker of the child, then yes, they have a certain leave allotment under US federal law to do that, and then they can return to their job and if they're the primary caretaker, they get the same respect or disrespect--depending on the employer--as parents get, e.g. schedule-bending for teacher conferences, daycare crises, &c.
Only if it's done without common sense.
Actually, if you follwo this thread through, you will see a very common theme. Try harder. I shall point it out again directly below.
I was more referring to your goofy examples in lieu of consideration of the issues I was raising. Just because you quote the words doesn't mean you address them.
That's because you tend to go grandstanding and ignore material. So here I shall repeat what I have been asking throughout this thread.
Actually, as I read through it, all I see is you declaring religion a hobby. You're very welcome to that opinion. It's one of the nice things about freedom, and it seems that there is a freedom of religion in Australia that includes the right to observance.
It's your opinion. I don't particularly consider it that dignified an issue.
That's like a NAMBLA member calling it "love".
People can call things whatever they want. If it's so important for you to presume the nature of something, well and fine. But there's not much I can say that's dignified. I'm accustomed to these kinds of rhetorical turns in your arguments. They annoy me, but the alternative is to ask you to fuck off, and there's no real reason to go that far, is there? I'm not about to accept your choice of words just for the hell of it. What's the point of discussing something if I hand you your presumption in advance? I can't see why you would ask for it, either, except that I should remind you that just because you say so doesn't make it true. Religion is a fairly unique hobby. How many other hobbies are protected by the Australian Constitution?
And what are you going to do about it? That could be a topic in itself.
The issue, as I have pointed out again in this post several times, is that you seem to advocate a different standard for different people. For the society to be egalitarian, a single rule must apply to all. If there are twenty people and only one bite of chocolate, nobody gets chocolate. If a man working at a chip printing line can't tak ten minutes off to play his trombone, then no worker should be able to take that time off from any job for personal practices. The only other possibility is to create separate rules for each job, and for each type of personal activity. You think you can design a fair set of rules to cover so many variables?
So ... help me out with one thing, first. Why on earth did you go and throw out the principles we've agreed on so far? I've already mentioned your rhetorical presumption, so I won't harp on the point.
Right now the single rule in question is a matter of the right of the individual to religious observance. You, too, have this right. That you choose not to use it is your own choice. In the US, many people choose not to use their right to vote. I find
that sad. But it's also amazing to me how many of those people use their less direct forms of expression, namely whining and moaning. This is an aside, though, and is not intended to reflect editorially on you in any way. All I'm after is that people have rights that they choose not to use. I
have, in the past, employed my Second Amendment right to bear arms; I carried knives because I just don't like guns. But these days I don't carry weapons. I don't want to take the guns out of people's hands. I want to give them less reasons to use them. This is a far cry, though, from demanding that since I don't use a firearm, nobody else do. Comparatively, you, too, have the right to religious observance. That you choose not to use it is your own choice, but the right to reasonable accommodation of religious observance must remain as long as religion is a protected "hobby". Now, in terms of the topic case, I keep hoping that someone will post a local Aussie article that actually tells us the resolution of the reasonable accommodation question. Namely, if his job description seems to be one of the vital ones in question, then you are correct that reasonable accommodation threatens production. From there, we must look to the employer's behavior.
Now, if you're "thanking" me for pointing out that emplolyers
can't account for everything, why are you also asking me to do what the employers cannot?
It is, literally, a case-by-case basis. Of course, imagining myself as an employer, if someone raised such issues with your posts raise in such a ridiculous manner, I would consider firing them for their inability to be part of the team. As such, if I ever run a large enough business that such an issue could be part of it, you can expect that my hiring teams would be instructed to filter out your kind of contrarian shite. While it works great for avoiding topics at Sciforums, it doesn't work well toward production. Your intentional lack of understanding of other people is more problematic than a Muslim needing to pray for ten minutes. And yes, the laws would let me do that. But one thing you have to remember is that if I ever run a business it would be a creative media operation, where discord aiming toward ignorance would be easily demonstrable as detrimental to the work effort.
Think of it this way: if you were my employee and complained about such circumstances according to the lack of dignity you've employed in this topic, I would either (A) not pay attention, or (B) give you
exactly what you wanted. For instance, when the employees officially ask for a drug-free workplace, I would get rid of coffee and soda as well. The end result is that if I give you what you want, you probably wouldn't want to work for me anymore, anyway.
Take responsibility for yourself, and stop spending so much energy trying to take authority in other peoples' lives.
--Tiassa
