Nathaniel M. Glasser, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in HR Dive, in “AI Mandates May Stir Up Religious Objections. HR Should Prepare Now.” by Ryan Golden.
Following is an excerpt:
Regulators, including the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are similarly reluctant to call a sincerely held belief into question. For that reason employers should be “very cautious” before attempting to challenge an employee’s religious belief on its own, said Nathaniel Glasser, member of the firm at Epstein Becker Green.
“To the extent that they have objective information that an employee does not have a sincere belief or that the belief is not religious in some way or another, that may be possible,” he said. “But that’s a potentially risky endeavor.” …
EEOC’s post-Groff guidance notes that employers may take into account factors such as increased operating costs, infringement on the rights of other employees and decreased efficiency when analyzing potential undue hardship. This analysis will be a fact-based, individualized determination, Glasser said, and the more objective factors an employer can point to, the better their chances of showing that opting out of AI use would pose undue hardship.
“Employers should be thinking now about the types of AI tools being offered to their employees and what those tools are intended to do with respect to each individual that’s going to be using them,” he added.
Another factor to consider is whether AI is so ubiquitous in a given work process or job that opting out would be unfeasible. Glasser illustrated this using a hypothetical manufacturing assembly line. The line incorporates AI such that even workers who perform only manual tasks are interacting with goods whose production is at least partly AI-assisted.
If a manual worker in this example asks for a religious accommodation permitting her to avoid interacting with products made by AI, that may be a very difficult ask for an employer, Glasser said. Evaluating the request could involve parsing just how distant a given job’s relationship is to AI.
“Employers will likely have to be prepared to engage in those discussions and get a better understanding of the underlying [religious] belief and what the employee believes they can and cannot do vis a vis AI,” Glasser said.
