A report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on the way the law deals with religion has suggested that employees might benefit from the principle of "reasonable accommodation" for their beliefs.
A series of high-profile cases in recent years has seen employees take legal action when they believed that their faith was in conflict with their employers' requirements. BA employee Nadia Eweida, nurse Shirley Chaplin, counsellor Gary McFarlane and registrar Lillian Ladele have all faced tribunals because their beliefs have come into conflict with managers' instructions.
Now a review of equality and human rights law relating to religion or belief by Peter Edge and Lucy Vickers of Oxford Brookes University has suggested that one way forward might be for workers to be able to ask their employers to think of different ways in which tasks might be performed in order to accommodate their beliefs.
The review points out that in the US, where employers do have such a duty, they are only required to show that they would face a minimal amount of inconvenience or extra cost before being able to turn a request down. However, it says that such a system might be less confrontational than the present one, which relies on an employee being able to claim discrimination.
The review also points out the objections to the "reasonable accommodation" principle. Workshop participants said that it would mark out religion and belief as having a special status and that it would not necessarily improve tensions in the workplace.
EHRC said: "The Commission will now begin work on its concluding report setting out its own views on these issues. The Commission's role is to promote and enforce the laws that protect everyone's right to be treated with fairness, dignity and respect. So we will take as our starting point the premise that services provided to the public should be available to everyone equally without discrimination, and that enabling employees to express their religion or belief should not cause a detriment to other employees or service users. The Oxford Brookes report provides a very useful starting point."
