Sunday 30 September 2007

Some employees are more equal than others

MUSLIM supermarket checkout staff who refuse to sell alcohol are being allowed to opt out of handling customers’ bottles and cans of drink.

Islamic workers at Sainsbury’s who object to alcohol on religious grounds are told to raise their hands when encountering any drink at their till so that a colleague can temporarily take their place or scan items for them.

Other staff have refused to work stacking shelves with wine, beer and spirits and have been found alternative roles in the company.

[...]

Mustapha, a Muslim checkout worker at the company’s store in Swiss Cottage, northwest London, interrupts his work to ensure that he does not have to sell or handle alcohol.

Each time a bottle or can of alcohol comes along the conveyor belt in front of him, Mustapha either swaps places discreetly with a neighbouring attendant or raises his hand so that another member of staff can come over and pass the offending items in front of the scanner before he resumes work.

Some of the staff delegated to handle the drink for Mustapha are themselves obviously Muslim, including women in hijab head coverings. However, a staff member at the store told a reporter that two other employees had asked to be given alternative duties after objecting to stacking drinks shelves.

So, let's see: these people, knowing that Sainsbury's sells alcohol-based products, agree to work for Sainsbury's, presumably under a standard contract of employment. No one has forced them to work for Sainsbury's, and they could always have chosen not to, if the prospect of having to sell alcohol is really so repugnant to them. They then refuse to fulfil the duties imposed on them by their contract. In response to this, Sainsbury's backs down, and allows them to pick and choose the work they do. I wonder whether this remarkably lenient treatment would be extended to non-Muslim employees? Or is it perhaps the case that if anyone else started raising moral objections to doing the job Sainsbury's paid them for, then Sainsbury's would - quite rightly - sack them quicker than you can say "Muslims get preferential treatment"?

I am quite a regular visitor to Sainsbury's stores. Sometimes I even buy alcohol there (not to mention pork-based products - will Muslim staff soon refuse to sell those as well?). And when I do so, I expect the people behind the counter to serve me quickly, politely, and without complaint. To refuse to serve a customer is the height of rudeness and unprofessionalism (as, indeed, is publicly making an unwanted and unrequested moral judgement on a customer's purchases), and should any damn Mohammedan low-life treat me with such rudeness, then you can be sure that I shall respond with equal discourtesy. Indeed, I would be sorely tempted to open the offending beverage, and pour it over the offending Mohammedan...

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

This one made me laugh, especially as many of the drug dealers in the North West and West Midlands are Muslim. Plus all the Poppy farmers in Afghanistan, and the Taliban who convert it to heroin and sell it to the West.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5h4PFBuzvw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fprodicus%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F2007%2F02%2Fyes%2Dthanks%2Dtom%2Dpaine%2Ehtml

'And we learn to be ashamed before we walk
Of the way we look and the way we talk.
Without our stories or our songs
How will we know where we've come from?
I’ve lost St George in the Union Jack -
It’s my flag too and I want it back.'

Please pass it on.

Anonymous said...

Muslims Against Sharia condemn the decision of Sainsbury's supermarkets to provide Muslim employees with an option of not handling alcohol. First, Muslims, or anyone else for that matter, must not be allowed to force their religious practices onto general public. Second, if Muslims who work at Sainsbury's feel that handling alcohol violates their religious beliefs, they should not be working at Sainsbury's to begin with.

Source: Times Online: Muslim checkout staff get an alcohol opt-out clause

bernard said...

Sainsburys is a wholly jewish owned firm, and all this may just boil down to an appeasing gesture of friendship by them, to their RoP employees.
Brothers in arms Tescos may well try a similar gesture, but I doubt if part-owned U.S. Asda, would.

Anonymous said...

Employ Muslims - Expect trouble.

Any company wishing to meet its 'ethnic' quotas should employ Sikhs, Hindus, Sri Lankans etc. Muslims can be readily identified by their names - check for Muslim or Arabic origin at http://www.babynamesfamily.com/popular_boys_baby_names.html

Fulham Reactionary said...

Bernard:

Why would Jews be particularly likely to want to appease Muslims? So far as I can see, Jews have often been among the most resistant to dhimmitude/Islamification. After all, they are among those who have most to fear from it (admittedly, there are also a sizeable number of very liberal pro-Muslim Jews, who seemingly have some sort of death wish).

I would think that this decision owes more to a sort of general corporate dhimmitude, motivated by the fear of being labelled "Islamophobic" if the Muslims do not get what they want, than it does to the involvement of any particular ethnic group. See Greggs the Bakers and their recently-installed Muslim-only toilets for another example of this.

In any event, while the Sainsbury family have Jewish ancestry, they now only own 18% of the company, so I don't think it can be considered "wholly Jewish owned". I'm also not aware that Sainsbury's chief executive, Justin King, is Jewish. The same I think goes for Tesco: founded by a Jew, Jack Cohen, but no longer owned by his family, and with a non-Jewish chief executive (Terry Leahy).

Of course, there are rumours that Sainsbury's could be taken over by the Qatari royal family, who are of course Muslims, in name at least. Which might prove quite interesting, in a way: if Sainsbury's were owned by Muslims, could Muslim employees get away with crying "Islamophobia"?

bernard said...

Fulham:
You have done some recent research on the big chain stores (as they were once called) but I was just remembering their early ownership in the 50s and 60s.
You rhetorically ask why some jews are pro Muslim. The real conundrum is why so many jews in high Govt, esp on the liberal left and in both main parties, are SO multiculturalist, which in reality, amounts to the same.
I had a spat about this many months ago on ATW (from which I'm now banned) and was expanding on the highly influential jewish marxist Frankfurt School of the 1930s which fostered the idea of mixing cultures, esp in the West, for political aims.
The idea then was 'divide and rule'; the oldest game around; but, as the saying goes "fate and circumstance conspire to prove the man a fool" and that early marxist concept is falling to bits, as no-one foresaw the massive rise of radical, anti-jewish Islam.
The proverbial hens are coming home to roost.

Anonymous said...

It starts with the refusal to handle alcohol. Then they will refuse to handle ham, pork and bacon, then non-halal produce, followed by underwear, then folk with guide dogs will be turned away, magazines with pictures of people and animals will be declared off-limits, then make-up, perfume, Christmas cards, decorations, and crackers, will be verboten.
Then once they have decimated the permissible stock, they will all bugger off to say their prayers and leave a whole queue of customers to whistle dixie.

Maybe WE should boycott THEM, so they become unemployable.

Monty

Anonymous said...

Don't shop at any Sainsbury that employs muslims. Alternatively do what I once did at IKEA when on the receiving end of shoddy service; walk away from the till leaving your overflowing trolly behind halfway through being checked out. The joy of this is that,if you have the time, repeat this exercise as many times as you want.

bernard said...

Anon @ 10.41.

Very well said.

In fact where it says: '10 items or less', you can expect 'Muslim checkout only', in the near future.

Fulham Reactionary said...

Bernard:

When were you banned from ATW? And what reason was given?

bernard said...

FR:
19th Sept. No feedback.
Mr. Smith asked me the same question.
Thought it might be a server fault, so tried Firefox instead.
No deal there iether, so it was'nt a server prob. Who knows.

Fulham Reactionary said...

Sorry to hear about that, Bernard. I do recall, though, that for a time some of ATW's American readers were unable to access the site, as a result of some technical hitch. Perhaps you are a victim of something similar.

The only person who could ban you is David, and I would have thought it unlikely that he would do so (and, indeed, do so without warning) unless you had done something really heinous. So there may be some kind of technical issue at play. If you want, then maybe Mr Smith or myself could e-mail David, just to confirm whether or not you have actually been banned. After all, if there is in fact a technical problem, it may be affecting other readers as well.

bernard said...

OK, FR, as you see fit.
ATW blog is better than the Iain Dale one; AND, I hate to see all those po-faced lefty comments on ATW go un-challenged.