Office politics and God

Muslims, Jews, Pentecostal Baptists -- religious discrimination in the workplace is an equal-opportunity troublemaker.

By Christopher S. Stewart

Apr 17, 2003 | On a gray, snowy day last year in Wichita, Kan., where vast wheat plains stretch for miles out and exude an almost unbearable mood of desolation in the winter months, Sami Hammad, a 36-year-old airplane mechanic, finally hit rock bottom.

Walking into the hangar that brittle February morning, where he worked for the Montreal-based aircraft manufacturer Bombardier, Hammad encountered a picture of a Taliban figure plastered to his locker. It shouldn't have come as much of a surprise. He'd endured ridicule for his Muslim faith for years from co-workers. But for some reason it was different that morning. It broke him. With a mix of sadness and defeat, he froze and just stared at the image, while half a dozen workers looked on and laughed. No one would take credit. He says that day he felt like the loneliest man on earth. "I have to tell you," he confesses, "it depressed me so bad seeing that picture. It just really hit me -- that no matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, no matter how much time I put in, I would never be accepted here. I would always be the hated Muslim my co-workers want out."

In complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Hammad, a sturdy, boyish-looking Muslim man from Sudan, describes years of alienation, sadness, and emotional turmoil at the hands of co-workers who relentlessly tormented him about the black color of his skin, his choice in music, the food he ate and -- mostly -- his religion. Hammad says that the abuse started shortly after he arrived in the fall of 1995 and didn't let up for the six years he worked at Bombardier. According to the EEOC, the aircraft manufacturer had 20 similar complaints filed against it in 2001 and 2002.

Bombardier is not the only company where such incidents occur. Religious intolerance in the workplace is threatening to create massive rifts between workers in factories and offices across America. According to the EEOC, worker complaints of religious discrimination jumped 85 percent in the last decade. In 2002, complaints grew 21 percent compared to the year before. And although such cases make up less than 10 percent of overall workplace discrimination complaints across the nation, religious harassment suits are rising at the fastest rate.

A nationwide survey of personnel executives last year conducted by the New York-based Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding found that 36 percent of respondents said there are more religions represented in their offices than five years ago. Sixty percent of those surveyed said religious harassment occurs in the workplace. Of those, 50 percent believe that religious bias affects performance.

Indeed, the American workplace is undergoing a metamorphosis. Why? A shift in office demographics, for starters, from an influx of immigrants and an aging population. Add to that a workforce profoundly affected by recent world events and tragedies, and the more recent politicization of religious issues.

"This was an emerging issue that has now emerged," said Georgette Bennett, president of the New York-based Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, a nonsectarian organization for the prevention of religious conflict in the workplace. "These conflicts are bad," says Bennett, "bad for morale, bad for productivity, bad for business." And she warns that the situation is only getting worse. "What we're seeing here is just the tip of the iceberg."

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War was not what Hammad wanted with his colleagues. But it came in fits and starts anyway. He claims that he was turned away from training programs because of his religion and race. Many times, workers declined to team up with him. For years, he was denied requests to leave for two hours of weekly Friday prayers even though he promised to make up the work at a time of the manager's choosing. He tells of coming into the hangar one morning to find chemical solvent slathered on his toolbox and graffiti concerning sexual acts with camels written about him on the bathroom wall. Frequently, he was urged "to go back to his Muslim country." When Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed in 1999, he recalls an angered co-worker saying, "What is this damn Muslim religion that supports suicide?"

Leaving the company was perpetually on his mind. But he fretted about having to start over again at the bottom, which would have entailed taking on the overnight shift and getting a smaller paycheck. It also concerned him that there was no guarantee that workers would be more receptive to him at one of the other aircraft manufacturers sprinkled throughout Kansas and Arkansas. Even at home he couldn't escape his problems. He constantly worried. He lost sleep and agonized about being tired on the job and getting injured. He sought the help of a psychiatrist to battle stress-related sicknesses. Increasingly, he grew distant from his wife. "Some people are just so evil. And it was killing me every day in so many different ways," Hammad recalls. "I was falling apart, really unraveling. I was backed up against the wall and didn't know what to do."

Hammad didn't force his theological ideas onto others, he says. He stuck to himself, spending his time working solitarily on the technical aspects of airplanes, piecing together landing gear, and making certain that the power systems were functioning properly -- a demandingly exact job that he compares to surgery and that earned him high marks from supervisors. At lunch, when the other 87 men on the floor were talking sports, women and home improvements, Hammad tells of how he used to sneak away to pray in a dimly lit closet stocked with mops and brooms that reeked of disinfectant.

"I tried to be as quiet as possible when it came to my religion, because I knew they had problems with it," he says. "For me it was a non-issue. I was there to work, not to talk about God."

Like the 300,000-plus population of Wichita, dubbed "the air capital city of the world" and a base for industry heavyweights like Boeing and Cessna, a vast majority of the 4,000-plus men at Bombardier are white and natives of the state, or at least the Midwest. According to Greg Harper, the union representative at Bombardier, there are a handful of other foreigners at the company besides Hammad and none of them is in a decision-making position. "That's the reality of these aircraft companies out here," he says. Harper describes Bombardier as a tough and brutish world, where management focuses more on production and profits than on strained relationships between workers.

That's a motivational disaster waiting to happen, says Todd Campbell, manager of diversity at the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) in Arlington, Va. Campbell says that some companies suffer from a kind of myopia about the issue. "You might be able to suppress religious expression and race in the short term, but in the long haul, the companies that don't educate and work on policies of integration and respect will lose out. With a changing workforce and a global economy, even companies in the most remote U.S. cities and towns will have to adjust.

"What you have to remember," Campbell adds, "is that when employees feel respected and valued in the workplace, they generally do better work. Managing them properly sends a message that the company respects individual differences."

In the six years Hammad worked for Bombardier, he filed 15 grievances and sought out the aid of numerous supervisors. However, management shrugged him off, he claims, advising him not to stir the pot. One man told him that complaining would only "get him hurt." In the end, what came of his protests was a demotion to the production department, where he pieced together the monstrous jets -- a job that required less skill and provided fewer options for advancement. To make matters worse, his wife left him, complaining that he'd become a bitter man. "I didn't ask for this," Hammad groans. "I went to work just like everyone else. I was Muslim. I didn't push it. I didn't talk about it. So why did they?"

Harper offers an unsettling answer. "You should realize that if you're different here, you're going to lose." It was Harper who signed off on all of Hammad's complaints and spoke out unsuccessfully against the demotion. "The good ol' boys always win in this company," Harper says. "You can't prove that, of course. But it's their world. They make the decisions."

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