KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
The sometimes-tense conversation about religious accommodation in the workplace is playing out in rural Colorado. In Fort Morgan, there was a dispute over prayer breaks at a Cargill meatpacking plant, and it led to the firing of 150 Muslim workers.
Luke Runyon from member station KUNC reports.
LUKE RUNYON, BYLINE: It's midday at Nurto and Sadiyo Abdi's apartment in Fort Morgan, a rural town on Colorado's eastern plains. The 20-something sisters are having spiced tea with milk.
NURTO ABDI: It's too hot.
RUNYON: The sisters are refugees, finding their way to Fort Morgan five years ago from their home country of Somalia. Five times a day, the sisters stop to pray, an essential part of their Muslim faith, Nurto says.
ABDI: If I stop my prayer time, everything is hard for me. Everything's hard for me if I stop the prayer time.
RUNYON: In mid-December, they say their supervisor at Cargill's beef processing plant told a small group of employees they could no longer leave their stations on the meat-cutting line to pray.
ABDI: Four times we pray in home - our homes, only pray one time in Cargill, and they say we don't have time to go prayer time.
RUNYON: The incident snowballed. The sisters joined with nearly 150 other workers, staying home to protest what they saw as a change in company policy. Until then, they'd been allowed to take a short five-minute break to pray. After three days of failing to show up, they triggered Cargill's no-call, no-show policy and were fired.
MIKE MARTIN: Nobody was ever told that prayer was abolished or that prayer could not be accommodated.
RUNYON: Mike Martin is a Cargill spokesman.
MARTIN: There are times, specific times when, because of staffing levels, an individual request for prayer may not be granted at a specific time on a specific day.
RUNYON: During the last decade, America's meatpacking plants have become increasingly diverse, with more immigrants from various cultural and religious backgrounds filling jobs to cut meat. Martin says Cargill has attempted to keep up, installing reflection rooms for prayer in its facilities and being flexible with break times. Still, cross-cultural misunderstanding and tension is inevitable.
MARTIN: It would be hard to go, you know, year-round without somebody misperceiving something, but this seems to be on a different level.
RACHEL ARNOW-RICHMAN: The reality is that it's not always clear what constitutes a reasonable accommodation or an undue hardship.
RUNYON: Rachel Arnow-Richman is a workplace law professor at the University of Denver. In a large slaughterhouse, for example, one person missing for 10 minutes can slow down an entire shift. And she says if a religious accommodation like a prayer break imposes a significant cost on the employer, they don't have to do it.
ARNOW-RICHMAN: The subtleties of what is required or what the employer permits, versus what a supervisor actually does - those can certainly get lost in any workplace, you know, not even accounting for language and cultural differences.
RUNYON: In a bid to give some workers a chance at getting their jobs back, Cargill is allowing the fired employees to reapply at the end of January. But Michaela Holdridge, executive director of One Morgan County, a nonprofit in Fort Morgan, says it might be too little too late.
MICHAELA HOLDRIDGE: We already have word of about 20 families or so who have already left.
RUNYON: Holdridge says the families are scattering across the Midwest and Great Plains.
HOLDRIDGE: If you don't have your job here, there's not much to stay for.
RUNYON: And with that many people leaving a small town all at once, Holdridge says a new wave of people with religious and cultural differences could find themselves looking for work in Fort Morgan.
For NPR News, I'm Luke Runyon in Greeley, Colo.
MCEVERS: That story came to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food.