Red Letter Day

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Religious? Work in transit? Move to Minneapolis and you have it made!

It must be something in the water of one of those 10,000 lakes or something, but the (allegedly) tolerant city of Minneapolis has become a haven for intolerant transit employees who cloak their prejudice under the guise of religion, and have somehow managed to actually get their bosses to accept their refusal to to the job they were hired to do.

Yes, it is true, if you are a bus or cab driver in Minneapolis, you can give customers the shaft...as long as God tells you it's OK.

The latest two examples of this ridiculous trend include Muslim cab drivers refusing fares who are carrying unopened bottles of wine in their luggage and a Christian bus driver refusing to drive a bus with an ad for a gay newspaper on its side.

The amazing thing is not that some people are trying to get out of doing the job they are paid to do on very shaky "religious": grounds, but that management is actually letting employees get away with this kind of crap. I have no problem when a religious employee would want time off for holidays and other reasonable, legal accomodations for belief, but when someone actually refuses to serve certain customers and won't do the job for which they were hired due to religion, that goes way over the line.

The Minneapolis taxi commission should tell its drivers that they must accept all fares, or they lose their medallions. And that bus driver needs to drive any bus she is assigned, or no busses at all. If the bus and cab drivers don't like this, they can find other jobs that don't require them to serve members of a diverse public.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment



<< Home