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Millennium Fever Poses Challenges for Employers
The coming millennium brings with it a host of unusual new stresses in the workplace, driven by varied visions of apocalypse.
Start Date: 1/25/99
As reported in the Contra Costa (California) Times newspaper on January 21, 1999, the coming millennium brings with it a host of unusual new stresses in the workplace. This time we're not talking about technological bugs like Y2K; we're talking about religious fervor triggered by visions of apocalypse.
San Francisco-based attorney Jeff Tanenbaum says he's already taken nearly a dozen calls from human resource managers who aren't sure what their legal obligations are when faced with unusual millennial behavior. For example, Tanenbaum says, employees at two Bay Area firms recently began preaching apocalyptic messages to fellow employees during work hours. How to handle such behavior, when it is linked to genuine religious belief, is a delicate legal question.
Problems that Tanenbaum has already seen include people who suddenly begin wearing unusual clothing; people who spout Biblical prophecy during meetings or employment reviews; people who request time off to attend special religious gatherings; and people who espouse violence in keeping with some kind of apocalyptic expectation. The question is, are such behaviors protected under the law? In most cases, Tanenbaum says, the answer is yes.
"Employers do need to make reasonable accommodations on a case-by-case basis," agrees Tom Makris, a San Francisco employment lawyer. But the trick, says attorney Rebecca Eisen, is "to determine that the belief is genuinely religious in nature." And that can tread into sensitive areas of personal privacy and discrimination. Also at issue is whether one person's fervor is another person's harrassment -- and whether the behavior can be construed as illegal.
No one said this millennium thing would be easy.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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