Islamophobia in the Workplace

The D.C. Labor and Employment Relations Association, along with Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, hosted on April 26, 2017, a conversation on Islamophobia and how it impacts Muslims in the workplace. Meira Neggaz, Executive Director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, shared facts and figures on American Muslim communities and experiences of Islamophobia. She highlighted that the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission has consistently received disproportionately high numbers of religious-based discrimination complaints from Muslims who have been mistreated in the workplace due to their faith. Qasim Rashid, Director of Civil Rights and Policy at Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, spoke about personal experiences of Islamophobia and how American Muslims are often unaware of or ill-equipped to assert their rights in the face of discrimination. Attendees at the event were from a range of industries, and they were eager to hear about the problem of Islamophobia and some of the groups working to remedy it. Bridge researcher Jordan Denari Duffner shared a bit with the attendees about the initiative’s work.