Khadar Ducaale spent the first few days of the new year helping his neighbors file unemployment claims.
Ducaale is a longtime community activist in Fort Morgan who runs the local Somali Community Office, which is designed to help immigrants transition to life in the town. This year, he’s spending a lot of time helping the nearly 200 Muslim employees who were fired from the Fort Morgan Cargill plant Dec. 23 after they claimed its management was no longer allowing them to pray in the workplace. The Council of American-Islamic Relations is negotiating with Cargill representatives to resolve the conflict, but in the meantime, some are looking for work elsewhere.
“It’s kind of between a rock and a hard place,” Ducaale said. “People want to go back [to work], but they still want to pray.”
Hassan Ibrahim has worked for Cargill since 2009. He held a supervisor position until he and his wife, who also worked at the plant, were fired for failing to come to work three days in a row.
Muslim workers at the plant have always taken five- to 10-minute breaks during their shift for afternoon prayers, he said. They typically left the assembly line one or two at a time, covering for each other to avoid slowing down production. But on Dec. 18, Ibrahim said, they were told they would no longer be allowed to do so. So the following Monday, he and about 200 of his co-workers left work at the plant’s second shift and didn’t come back.
Since then, he’s been applying for other jobs in the area.
“We have no income right now,” Ibrahim said. “If they let us pray, we would go back.”
Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR, said he is still negotiating with Cargill representatives to resolve the conflict.
“We’re hoping to negotiate a return to work for these employees,” he said. “Hopefully the company will be able to adjust its policy, or at least allow people to pray under the existing circumstances.”
Current company policy dictates that Cargill employees who have been fired have to wait six months before applying again. Mike Martin, director of communications for Cargill, said they are “considering significantly reducing that interval.” But so far, no final decisions have been made.
Since the employees were fired, the second shift at the Fort Morgan plant has been operating at a significantly reduced capacity, and the company has put up “now hiring” signs all over town.
Cargill representatives have consistently denied changing any policies regarding religious accommodation. The Somali workers say they aren’t sure who ordered the reported ban on prayer, though Ibrahim said it occurred after the plant hired a new second shift manager.
Most of the workers would be willing to come back to Cargill if they were sure they’d be allowed prayer breaks.
“Everybody liked the job,” Ibrahim Hirsi, who had worked for Cargill for nine months before the dispute, said. “When I was interviewed, I asked them, could I get the break time, four minutes or five minutes, and they said, ‘Sure, no problem.’...But it’s not that simple.”
Islam requires its followers to pray at six specific times throughout the day.
“While reasonable efforts are made to accommodate employees, accommodation is not guaranteed every day and is dependent on a number of factors,” Martin said in an earlier press release.
CAIR and Cargill representatives are hoping to set up a teleconference this week to help resolve their dispute, but no date had been set as of Tuesday.
While the conflict has attracted attention from national news media, Ducaale said some Somalis feel it is the latest example of how their needs are ignored in Fort Morgan itself.
“We are part of this city,” he said. “We want to be part of the city. We have shops, we are contributing to the economy, we want to be here. But there is some kind of silence that all of us feel.”