Cargill has fired around 180 Somali workers at a northeastern Colorado meatpacking plant after a dispute over access to Muslim prayer time.
Last week, roughly 200 Somali employees at a large beef-processing plant in Fort Morgan essentially walked off the job after claiming that Cargill wasn't allowing some workers to take prayer breaks.
The Minnetonka-based agribusiness giant says it has long accommodated such prayer breaks, and that after the Somali workers did not show up for work for three consecutive days, Cargill terminated their employment.
The Somali workers didn't report for work after long-standing tensions over prayer breaks at the plant culminated in an incident Dec. 18 in which some workers were denied such breaks by supervisors, said Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has interceded on behalf of the Colorado workers.
On Dec 18, "some people did get a chance to pray, but a majority did not," he said. After those who didn't get to pray questioned a supervisor, they were told, "If you don't want to work here, go home."
In the Muslim faith, prayer is required five times a day, a mandate that has sometimes led to conflicts with U.S. employers, particularly meatpackers with largely immigrant workforces.
Since 2009, Cargill, one of the largest U.S. beef processors, has had two "reflection rooms" for prayer at its Fort Morgan plant, which employs about 2,000. The plant takes in live cattle and ships out boxed beef. Prayer breaks usually last about five minutes. The issue at Cargill on Dec. 18 involved the Muslim workers' sundown prayer, which occurs during the second shift.
Mike Martin, a Cargill spokesman, said that typically up to three employees from a single department are allowed to go pray at one time. On Dec. 18, 11 meat-cutting workers asked to go pray and were told "they could go a few at a time, they couldn't go together. So they all went."
