Equal Opportunity Employer?

Writer’s warning: The following blog post may contain material that may be offensive to some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

Last week, I wrote that most Staples stores would be closed Easter Sunday. I never heard from any of my former colleagues or from any other Staples employee so I assumed that Staples in Maine was closed.

To find out for myself, I decided to call the local store that I used to work at. The phone message didn’t say that the store was closed and when I went to get transferred all I got was “all associates are with other customers”. I stayed on the line for about 3 minutes and assumed that the store was closed and someone didn’t fix the phone to say the store would be closed.

I would really hate to have been a real customer who thought the store was really busy and decided to go the store to go shopping for the day. Even if the store was really open, I would probably be part of very small minority of Caucasian people in the store.

In other words, the store would probably be filled with non-Christian customers.

Now, I know that I am opening a real can of worms here by saying that, but seriously any Christian person would probably spend the day with their family as opposed to going shopping. Even the big box stores like Target know better than to being open on one of the biggest religious holidays of the year.

As I pointed out in my last post, I was forced to use a personal day to offset the lost Sunday. I believe that this certainly violates not only freedom of religion rights but also their status as an equal opportunity employer.

Even if the company asked even one employee or if a Christian employee volunteered to work on Easter Sunday, it would be a true violation of the above mentioned rights.

So why would the company want to be open during a Christian holiday?

My thought points to the fact that 3 of the top people at Staples are non-Christian people (or at least that is what their names points). The most prominent one is Demos Pameros, President of the U.S. Staples stores. While I could not find an origin of this last name, my thought is that it is close to a Muslim based name. Again, this is an assumption which may or may not be true.

However, my point is that if Mr. Pameros is of non-Christian faith, it would not surprise me in the least to want to have stores open on one of the most religious holidays of the Christian calendar. His belief is probably that there would be enough non-Christian people out there to make it practical to be open.

Unfortunately, there is a big problem with this philosophy.

They need employees to work Easter/

I don’t believe that Staples have enough non-Christian employees to allow all Christian employees to have had the day off. Therefore, Staples violates freedom of religion and also is violating their “equal opportunity employer” status.

When I worked at Staples, the most number of employees that I believe that were non-Christian was 4. This is certainly not enough to cover all the hours on Easter even if they were still employed with the company. I don’t think that there is any store in the company that has enough non-Christian employees to even be open for even 1 hour much less a full day.

So why does Staples enjoy violating people’s rights?

The simple answer is that they lie.

Are you surprised about that?

How about discriminate as well?

Yes, they do that to as I am the perfect example of that.

Briefly put, when I became disabled during my final year at the company, I was constantly harassed by the management as to when I would be able to stop using a stool that was allowed by my doctor. In fact, my doctor was harassed by having to fill out what seemed to be endless paperwork stating my disability. In the end, I was terminated because of my disability whether Staples believes that or not. I will have much more to say about that in future posts.

So if Staples can discriminate to me because of a disability and can make employees work on a religious holiday are they really an “Equal Opportunity Employer” or as what I have been writing about in this blog as a bunch of liars?

I will leave that for you, the reader to decide. I already know my answer.