More than a month after about 200 Somali employees were fired from the Fort Morgan Cargill plant, the original conflict has yet to be resolved.
The workers were terminated at the end of December after a dispute with the second shift management about prayer time at work. After the story reached national headlines, Cargill Meat Solutions changed its re-hiring policy to allow the unemployed workers to re-apply for their jobs after 30 days. Now about a quarter of them have returned to work, but others are getting ready to file a lawsuit against the company.
Said Ali, a Fort Morgan imam and former employee at Cargill, said he doesn’t want to go back for a few reasons. One is that there are many disadvantages to being a new hire, and he wouldn’t be guaranteed to get his old position back. The other is that he feels the problem he walked away from in the first place still exists.
“Their condition on the prayers is the same,” he said, through an interpreter. “They haven’t changed.”
Cargill’s religious accommodation policy allows workers to leave for a prayer break (separate from meal or bathroom breaks) one or two at a time, at the discretion of their supervisor. The company’s spokesman, Michael Martin, claims that policy never changed.
But the workers say that in December they were denied prayer breaks for multiple days in a row, and were led to believe they wouldn’t be allowed to pray at work anymore.
Khadar Ducaale, a local community activist, believes one or two second-shift supervisors were responsible, and that they may have had political motives. Regardless of where the problem started, most Muslim workers aren’t willing to go back unless they believe prayer breaks will be allowed.
In the meantime, Ali is still unemployed.
“I’m just waiting for them to change these harsh rules,” he said. “We don’t give up hope.”
There are few job opportunities available to Somalis in Morgan County, since most of them don’t speak fluent English. If Cargill’s practices don’t change, many of them will have to leave the area. Some are only waiting until their children get out of school, or in Ali’s case, until he finishes his citizenship application. But many of the former Cargill employees have lived and worked in Fort Morgan for five or six years, so they would rather stay and return to work. That’s why Ducaale said they’ve consulted with lawyers and with the Council on American-Islamic Relations to bring a lawsuit against Cargill, in an attempt to convince them to guarantee prayer breaks.
“For folks who say Muslims are not willing to compromise, I would like to remind them that we have compromised a lot,” Ducaale said. “In my country, as a Muslim, the week starts on Saturday, it doesn’t start Monday. Friday is a prayer day, and we don’t go to work...We have given up all that as soon as we came here.”
Cargill employees also gave up two major Muslim holidays, and their religion’s practice of praying together at specific times of day, in order to work there. All they want is to make sure they’ll be allowed to pray at some point during their shift.
“We have already given up most of our identities here,” Ducaale said. “And we are still willing to negotiate, to come to the table and find a solution to this problem.”
Cargill representatives could not be reached for comment over the weekend. Ali and Ducaale said the local Teamsters Union, with which most of the fired workers were affiliated, hasn’t negotiated with Cargill on their behalf. But they’re still hopeful that the Somali workers and the meat packing plant can come to a resolution soon.