Muslim workers are on bended knee in prayer. Company officials are on their toes.
The result: a ruckus-free Ramadan.
So far, anyway.
“Everything is smooth now, and people are happy, and the company is happy,” said Asad Abdi, vice president of the East Africa Community Center in Greeley.
Abdi and Graen Isse, another East Africa Community Center leader, visited the JBS USA plant on Monday, the first day of Ramadan to fall on a workday, to see how things went at sundown. That’s when Muslims break their daily fast and pause for evening prayers.
“Everyone was saying ‘happy Ramadan, happy Ramadan,’ ” Isse said. “It was very welcoming.”
The company had even put out dates, which are customarily eaten to break the fast, for the workers. At 10-minute intervals, the Muslims were allowed to leave production lines and go to prayer rooms — one for men, another for women.
“The people were working together on the line. They’re covering for each other,” Abdi said. “When one person goes to pray, the other covers his place. … If (JBS) knew it would be this easy, they wouldn’t have had the problems before.”
Last September, things were much different.
Essentially, JBS got caught flat-footed. The company appeared blindsided by the religious practices of a large new demographic in the plant work force — East African refugees.
The Ruckus of 2008 built steam over a week. First, Muslim workers complained when they couldn’t leave production lines for end-of-fast prayers. Company management responded by giving Muslims an earlier break time near sunset. The sudden schedule shift irked other workers, however, who said Muslims were being granted preferential treatment. They protested and claimed the company was acting in breach of the union contract.
The end result was severe. The company fired 100 Muslim workers for walking off the job. A similar fracas played out in Grand Island, Neb., where JBS also employs many East Africans.
The fine line of symbiotic harmony — a multinational company benefiting from low-skilled, low-wage laborers and East African refugees getting a chance to start life in a new country — became frayed when religious devotion crashed up against industrial commerce.
This year, with Ramadan beginning a month earlier, a compromise has been struck, apparently with union blessings (union representatives have been mostly mum).
Chandler Keys, JBS spokesman, said the company has spent much of the past year trying to reach a compromise.
“We think we have the right solutions to make sure the plant operates functionally and efficiently, but also trying to accommodate the needs of all the workers going into Ramadan, particularly the Somali workers,” he said.
Federal law prohibits discrimination based on religion. It requires employers to “reasonably accommodate” workers’ faiths, except to the extent that doing so would create undue hardships, such as sacrificing safety or efficiency.
Some will view JBS’s recent actions as caving to a religion that has a notorious extremist bent. Making concessions for Islam, they fear, will result in its practitioners gaining power until they reach their ultimate objective — global takeover.
The East Africans in Greeley say they have no intention to impose their religion on others. They love their new country, they say, and want to peacefully assimilate.
So, while the workplace tension has ebbed at JBS, the ideological divide between cultures is ever present, if not widening, as Muslims make inroads in practicing their faith on American soil.
The recent emergence of Coloradans Against Sharia Task Force, a local group that demonstrated outside JBS last week on the eve of Ramadan, is evidence that last year’s flare-up has morphed into a new pulse of tension. Michael Gale, the group’s leader, said the fact that Muslim workers walked off the lines last year is telling. “The fact they did walk off the job, they did demand these things, means they’re not moderate,” he said.
Abdi said it all comes down to people respecting each other. He doesn’t blame JBS for the flare-up of last September.
“They don’t know about the Muslim (religion),” he said. “I don’t blame them for it, because it’s hard for them to understand it at first.”