if people don’t celebrate holidays for religious reasons, can we take away their holiday perks?

A reader writes:

I have a few employees who have told us they do not celebrate birthdays, but they do sit to eat the lunch the company buys for the birthday person and then leave when it’s time to sing “happy birthday.” (One of them asks for cake after everyone goes back to work.)

These same employees say they do not observe holidays and do not attend parties (like the employee Christmas party), but they say they can receive the Christmas bonus that the company gives out.

Would the company be in the wrong not to invite them to the lunch or give them a monetary Christmas bonus since we are trying to comply with their religious beliefs?

Yes, the company would be 100% in the wrong.

Your employees are the experts on their own religious beliefs, and if they are comfortable receiving Christmas bonuses or eating birthday cake, then that’s how it works for them. The company has no standing to say, “Actually, we know better about your religious observances than you do.”

You can’t really claim that you’re trying to comply with their religious beliefs while overruling them about what that observance should look like.

It sounds like the subtext here is that you think they’re trying to get away with perks they somehow don’t deserve — like that they don’t really object to holiday celebrations when it can benefit them — but even if that were true, the stakes would be so low that it shouldn’t matter in the slightest. They’d be “getting away” with, what, eating cake without sticking around for a birthday song? Skipping a party? Who cares?

It would be different if the impact was greater, like if they said they couldn’t work Sundays for religious reasons and so other people always had to cover Sundays, but then suddenly they were willing to work on a Sunday when Rihanna was scheduled to tour your plant. Even then, you’d have a tricky time navigating that — because again, they’re the experts on their own religious observances, but it would at least be more understandable for it to raise some eyebrows.

But it would be astonishingly petty to try to withhold cake from them — and flat-out illegal to try to withhold the bonus on religious grounds.

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