Quote:
Originally Posted by faultytowers
Slightly OT but recently one of the big supermarket chains in the UK was in the newspapers because........'some' of their Muslim check-out staff refused to "handle" any alcoholic products. If a customer had a bottle of wine in their shopping the cashier would wait till another (non muslim) staff member was available to deal with the alcohol !!! How far will this go , vegetarian check-out staff refusing to handle any meat products , Hindu staff refusing to handle beef products.
There have also been cases of people joining the army (not conscripted) and then refusing to fight in certain countries !!!
The point of this post , no one has "forced" these people to take these jobs , they knew what would be expected from them when they applied for these positions and yet once given the job they then use "equal opportunity" or "discrimination" laws to force their employer to treat "them" differently from other employees.
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I see "your" point, but respectfully disagree. Smoking is somewhat unique in this argument. In this respect it is one employees personal action/habit within the work place that (arguably) affects the health of an other employee.
There are hundreds of jobs that fall in to classes where certain people either cannot or will not accept the duties. This may be for physical, religious or even health reasons. Some people cannot work in certain environments for any of these reasons and since the environment cannot be changed it becomes a choice to work there or not.
As an example, in the US the beer brewery industry has an exemption for exposure to CO2 (carbon dioxide) for certain tasks because it is the nature of the job ... and we can't stop making beers. Employees are informed about the potential exposures and have a choice whether they want to work there or not.
This all boils down to feasibility. It is feasible to "engineer" or tobacco smoke from a work place, whereas it is not feasible to engineer out alcohol products from a supermarket.
Back to smoking in bars ... it gets my vote, jut don't blow it right in my face.