On the flip side, this is a company that is fairly open about pushing certain religious views, including funding political campaigns to criminalize lifestyles they disagree with. The company also came under fire due to their attempts to have volunteers work for them, and to “pay” the volunteers in coupons for their food–fairly obvious and direct violations of employment laws. There have been other scandals before as well.

This is not making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a company with flagrant disregard for employment laws. If you constantly misbehave and flaunt the rules and regulations, you cannot be surprised when people react harshly to borderline cases. They have used up their goodwill and it’s absolutely justified for courts to view their actions in the harshest light.

It’s like Capone. Sure, tax evasion was almost certainly the least of his crimes, almost laughably irrelevant to the career of a violent gangster. But it was an opening, and the authorities quite properly took that opening.

I would also wonder whether “If you don’t violate your religious views you can’t move up the ladder” is legal. It’d be one thing if it was directly related to the job–someone with a religious taboo against blood transfusions won’t get far with organizations that do blood donations, for example–but this is fast food. I’m sorry, but if you’re a manager and can’t handle “I can’t work Saturdays” you’re incompetent, pure and simple. This is a perfectly normal sort of boundary for people in this line of work to have. If this was for child care, caring for a relative, going to school, etc., we wouldn’t even be having this conversation (or we’d be talking about how stupid the manager is). The only reason this is an issue is religion, and that makes it legally problematic. Enough to make it illegal? Eh, depends on where you are and what judge you get; there’s a broad gray area in the law. Enough that it should make any competent regional manager or executive question the manager’s competence? Absolutely. I’d be VERY curious what other policies and procedures this manager is ignoring.

For you Evil Hr Lady, I am not sure if the stylings of The Lunachicks ever made it onto a mix – tape or playlist for you… so I would be remiss if I did not share my favorite (and on theme) song of theirs now. Keep it Real! Keep HR Punk.

If a company fires someone for something like this (CEO should be fired ) as opposed to what they can do in their actual work then that company deserves whatever ill it gets.

And yes. I’ve been in HR for over 15 years. Most of that as a manager and prior to that I was an engineering manager for another 10 years.