Some employers practice religious discrimination

I have been hearing about discrimination towards the Asian crowd during this time in our life because the pandemic has come from China.

I would like to mention another discrimination that is hidden under the carpet: religious discrimination. I am a Seventh-day Adventist who keeps Saturday as the Sabbath. (It is biblical, nowhere does it say in our Holy Bible that it was changed to Sunday.) But when it comes to getting a job, and you say you don’t work on Friday night through Saturday, people won’t hire you because they are insistent that you have to work on that night, or Saturday.

I personally lost a job when I was 18. I tried to get a job at Allen Canning in Siloam and they were super interested in me, but when I said I couldn’t work on Saturday, they were like, “Oh, we work seven days a week. Sorry.”

I am now 58, and I have lost at least three jobs in my life because of this, and recently my daughters have been told no to work because they say they can’t work on Saturday.

One daughter was told, “Just one day a month, couldn’t you do that?”

This week, my son-inlaw lost a job at Simmons because he said he could not work on Friday night or Saturday. When he asked if he could possibly work and trade with a person who may want to trade the day, he was told no. So don’t think that discrimination is just color. It is religious too. It happens all the time, right in your back yard.

We are just one family it has happened to. I hope this opens the eyes of some employers, and they are willing to work with people who can’t work on the Sabbath.

Charlotte Robinson Siloam Springs