How Religious and Interfaith Actors Interpret the Religious-Secular Cleavage in Negotiations for Reasonable Accommodations in the Workplace

A key area of interaction of between religious groups and secular authorities has been the area of reasonable accommodation of religious minorities in the workplace. The stakes for this interaction have risen due to increasing religious diversity, the need for employers to better understand and address religious discrimination in the workplace, and the specificities of religious accommodations compared to those related to race, sexual orientation, and gender (Ghumman & Ryan 2015; Ghumman et al 2013). Along with human rights associations, trade unions, and faith-based employee resource groups, religious groups enter into negotiation processes as important intermediaries between employees of faith and employers to manage conflicts between different authorities (Pelisse 2022), help translate religious practices for legal bodies and/or employers (Ruggiu 2019), and devise specific and more inclusive approaches to accommodate religious minorities in the workplace (Raza 2023). To date there has been little research on how religious associations and interfaith organizations help individual cases of overcoming religious-based workplace discrimination (Garcia Yeste et al 2022). The proposed research will also expand on scholarship that looks at how discrimination affects different groups of employees in the workplace, shaping majority and minority group perceptions (Schneider et al 2022). This paper explores the role of religious minority actors in reasonable accommodation negotiations as a way to unveil two critical aspects of the religious-secular cleavage. First, mediations for workplace accommodations of religious minorities will inevitably reveal how religious actors present their religion against the backdrop of secular public institutions and laws. Scrutinizing these discourses will offer insights into the nature of the political-religion nexus. Second, negotiations between religious minorities and their employers may bring diverse religious actors into the negotiations, some more welcome than others, along with interfaith groups. Studying the interactions and dynamics between these religious and interfaith actors will contribute to our understanding of the collective action of religious groups in the field of advocacy (Berger 2003) that challenge majority group values and confront discrimination (Topidi and Pastore 2024). This research therefore uses exemplary cases of reasonable accommodation negotiations from the USA and Europe to firstly focus attention on the actors—religious and interfaith--that offer religious interpretations as well as the dynamics across them as well as their interactions with employees and employers. Secondly, I pay attention to discursive and framing strategies as they relate to religious and secular laws and texts, balancing these two spheres of authority. Finally, I take into account the context of the negotiations, which may become politicized by the media or political actors, to evaluate the response of religious actors. Overall, we will gain a refined picture of the ways in which religious actors are engaging as significant mediators in conflicts related to religious diversity in the workplace.