A week after the terrorist attacks in France last November, Bachir B., a passenger screener at Orly airport south of Paris, was called into his manager’s office. Bachir, a devout Muslim who wears a thick beard in keeping with his faith, was ordered to trim his facial hair. His boss even offered to buy him a beard clipper as a birthday gift, reports The New York Times.
While supervisors had sometimes reminded him of a company dress code requiring whiskers to be kept “tidy” and “short,” Bachir said that the rule had been enforced only sporadically over his six years working for Securitas, a private security company. This time, the manager made clear that the new crackdown was “because of what was happening in the news,” said Bachir, who asked that his last name not be used to protect his family’s privacy.
Bachir trimmed his beard that weekend. But he said his boss sent him home about 10 days later, again citing his failure to comply with the dress code. Soon after, Bachir received a registered letter from Securitas, saying that he was fired.
Reconciling the religious precepts of observant Muslims with the secular norms in the European workplace has long been a sensitive subject. France’s strict legal separation of religious and civic life — a legacy of the French Revolution known as laïcité — formally discourages, and in some situations expressly bans, public religious expression. It is a brand of secularism that coexists uneasily with Islamic traditions, making workplace negotiations about religious practice particularly difficult and prone to misunderstandings.
The issues have become thornier after the latest wave of terrorist activity, including the November attacks in Paris that left 130 dead. With much of the region on edge, the French government has set a forceful tone, granting sweeping emergency powers to the police and stepping up the scrutiny of mosques, Islamic associations and individuals. The sense of unease is particularly palpable for companies operating in sensitive areas like transportation, security and infrastructure.
Adding to workplace conflicts like the one at Securitas, as well as reports of tensions at other large employers, is that many Muslims have become more assertive in fighting stigmatization on the job. But many managers and union leaders in France report feeling ill equipped to respond to employee demands for things like dedicated prayer rooms or pork-free canteens — let alone to detect and combat genuine radicalization at work.
“Today, we are in a very complicated situation,” said Philippe Humeau, a researcher at InAgora, a consultancy that specializes in religion and the workplace.
While France’s workplace rules around religion are relatively distinct, the broad concerns are playing out globally, as countries confront the rise in terrorist activities. In the United States, questions of workplace safety arose after a radicalized California health department employee killed 14 colleagues in an attack on an office party in San Bernardino, California, in December.
“Most companies don’t know much about Islam,” he said. And in the current climate, “we are seeing companies confuse strict religious practice, which is already difficult to accept in France, with radicalization.”
The risk is that companies, in a quest to protect their staff and their clients, unfairly profile certain employees.
Bachir is convinced that he was fired over fears that his religious expression made him a possible security threat. He filed a discrimination complaint against Securitas with French prosecutors, who are reviewing it.
He is one of at least a half-dozen security guards — all bearded Muslim men — who have been let go by Securitas since the November attacks. They are all challenging their dismissals in a French labour court.
Their dismissals followed a similar pattern. In late November, they received the same written warning, copies of which were reviewed by The New York Times. “The face must be close-shaven, goatees, mustaches and beards kept short, trimmed, tidy and maintained,” the warnings stated. Weeks later, they were sent dismissal letters. The letters refer to repeated violations of the dress code, while a few, including Bachir’s letter, also list additional infractions such as unexcused absences and tardiness.
“That beard did not just grow from one day to the next,” said Eric Moutet, a lawyer representing the men. “But suddenly now it’s a problem? Clearly it’s not something about his behavior that has changed but rather it is the way that person is now being viewed.”
Securitas, which provides about 400 security agents to Orly airport under a multiyear contract and an additional 1,000 at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, declined to discuss the specific dismissals, citing the pending litigation. The security company said the beard rules, and the subsequent firings, adhered to the law. As a private company working on behalf of public sector clients like the airport, Securitas said it must conform to France’s strict secularism laws.
“We are confident,” Michel Mathieu, the head of Securitas’s French operations, said, in reference to the decision to fire the Orly guards. The company has not accused the guards of any illegal activities, nor has it presented any evidence that they engaged in radical behavior on the job. But he said that recent events had led Securitas to revisit its approach to all forms of religious practice in the workplace.
What some might view as overt religious profiling, Mr. Mathieu insisted had become a necessity for a company like Securitas, whose mission is to protect against potential dangers that now include Islamic terrorism. The risks, he added, were no longer abstract. Last year, Securitas alerted the French authorities to four security agents who, despite a rigorous vetting process that includes multiple background checks, were found in possession of jihadist propaganda on the job.
“French companies have been touched by the phenomenon of radicalization,” Mr. Mathieu said. “We have to be able to speak about these things.”
In the days after the deadly November attacks, it emerged that one of the gunmen identified in the attack at the Bataclan concert hall had once worked as a bus driver for RATP, the Paris transportation authority. Almost immediately, the French media questioned whether more radical Islamists might be lurking among the RATP’s staff. Some labor union leaders complained that managers, fearful of complaints from Muslim employees, had long tolerated religious behavior on the job that was explicitly prohibited by the company’s own policies.
The RATP chief executive, Elisabeth Borne, swiftly dismissed the speculation as overblown and warned against “conflating” religious practice with extremism. But the company also quietly acknowledged that workplace conflicts linked to religious behavior, albeit still “very marginal” in number, had become a concern in recent years.
“The RATP cannot escape the difficulties confronted by French society,” the company said in a statement.
Officially, France’s vigorous brand of secularism applies to all religious faiths. But over the last decade, regulations on laïcité (pronounced lie-EE-see-tay) have tended to focus on Islam. A law prohibiting government employees and high school students from wearing head scarves and other “conspicuous” religious attire was introduced in 2004. A specific prohibition against women wearing full-face veils in public went into effect in 2011.
Opinion polls show such bans have broad public support — and they have been upheld recently by Europe’s top human rights court. But they are resented by many of France’s five million Muslims who see the rules as unfairly stigmatizing their religion.
The principle of laïcité, however, applies only to those who work in France’s vast public sector economy. For private companies like Securitas, the situation is murkier.