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Scott Pilutik writes about an interesting court case in California, where two men are suing Diskeeper, a computer software company, over forcing them to attend Scientology training sessions as a condition of employment:
Alexander Godelman and Marc Le Shay, two Diskeeper employees (Godelman was CIO and Le Shay hired as the Automation Planning Officer) have filed a complaint in the Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that Scientology training was a condition of employment and that their refusal to participate led to their dismissal. According to the complaint, "{t]he working conditions and work environment at DISKEEPER were inextricably intertwined with the Scientology religion such that a non-Scientologist cannot escape constant impositions of said religion."When Godelman complained that these programs ran counter to his own religious belief (Judaism), former Diskeeper CEO and current Chairman Craig Jensen told Godelman that his attendance at the "training courses" was "not negotiable," adding that Godelman would become more intelligent and his personal life would "improve drastically." Jensen also warned Godelman to not "complain about the process" in emails, which Jensen feared would be "misconstrued" and/or "taken out of context." Le Shay was eventually fired after he refused to attend and participate in a course series entitled "Basic Study Manual" and after Godelman interceded on Le Shay's behalf, Godelman was also terminated.
Here are some of the legal questions presented:
The complaint alleges five causes of action--three based on Diskeeper's alleged violation of California's Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA): namely, discharge due to religious discrimination, discharge in violation of public policy, retaliation against persons opposing wrongful practices. A fourth cause of action claims that Diskeeper violates California Labor law, which prohibits employers from retaliating against persons refusing to participate in activity which would result in a violation of a federal or state statute or regulation. A fifth cause of action alleges that Diskeeper failed to maintain its statutory obligation to prevent discrimination.In response to Godelman and Le Shay's 3rd amended complaint, Diskeeper filed a Motion to Strike portions of Plaintiffs' complaint, specifically, Plaintiffs' requested remedy for...
"...prospective injunctive relief in the form of a prohibitory and/or mandatory injunction requiring Defendants to cease, desist and forever refrain from forcing or requiring any employee, as a condition of employment, to study, adopt and/or apply the so-called "Hubbard Management Technology" and/or the related "Hubbard Study Technology" in the workplace, according to proof at trial[.]"
Diskeeper argues in its motion that these injunction requests should be struck from the Complaint because Diskeeper is permitted to introduce religious training in the workplace and therefore any injunction which broadly prohibits religious practice in the workplace is unconstitutional.
You can see the complaint here and the motion to strike here. Both are PDF files.
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Comments
As they said in Bowfinger: "Welcome to MindHead".
Posted by: Mr Lynne | December 25, 2008 9:28 AM
" Diskeeper is permitted to introduce religious training in the workplace"
Are they a non-profit religous organization? Then no they aren't.
Posted by: Gloria Marcabia | December 25, 2008 10:14 AM
That is true, however, the part they want to strike reads:
Broad prohibition on religious practice in the workplace = unconstitutional. Broad prohibition against religious coercion in the workplace = civil rights law.
Seriously, Diskeeper should fire its lawyers.
Posted by: DaveL | December 25, 2008 10:27 AM
Diskeeper's Lawyers are scientologists too, to them a lawsuit isnt for winning, its to grind the opponent into the dirt with trivialities with the ultimate aim of breaking them financially.
Very Religious isnt it?
Posted by: Jinkii | December 25, 2008 10:45 AM
Diskeeper? Shit, that's the De-frag program that my brother loaded on my computer. He's a very smart scientifical man and totally faithless (in a religious sortaway). Does this mean my computer is being indoctrinated by the Ghost in the machine of El-Ron Hubbard? Yikes, if it ain't the ChiCom chip sets with the "Call Home" feature it's something like this. I'm going back to pencil and paper messages as soon as I can figure out how to e-mail them.
I think I just stumbled on the way to differentiate the truth about man's origins from the blather of ID Cretinism. The former is scientifical, the latter scientifecal.
Posted by: democommie | December 25, 2008 10:47 AM
Links broken?
Posted by: Lsuoma | December 25, 2008 12:05 PM
Broad prohibition on religious practice in the workplace = unconstitutional. Broad prohibition against religious coercion in the workplace = civil rights law.
you seem to fail to understand that religious coercion is religious practice for them
Posted by: T_U_T | December 25, 2008 12:41 PM
I hope Godelman and Le Shay have a lawyer working on contengency, which is possible depending on the strength of their case. I also hope they and their attorney have the fortitude to stand what ever Scientology throw at them through their "Fair Game" policy.
Posted by: AL Jeremy | December 25, 2008 1:47 PM
Diskeeper, and any other employer that requires religious practise should be required to disclose that information during a job interview, so that prospective employees can decide if they really want to work in that environment. You can be fairly certain that if such disclosure had been made, neither Godelman or LeShay would have accepted a job at Diskeeper. Recruitment into a religion by making it a condition of employment is a new tactic. Of course, as a former Scientologist I could tell them that Scientology is actually NOT a religion. All real religions that I know of are given away for free. Scientlogy makes you pay thousands of dollars for it.
Posted by: Ann Klein | December 25, 2008 4:02 PM
It is not the first time anyone has had this problem with Diskeeper.
Several stories of people going for a job interview being exposed (and screened) to Scientology.
Posted by: Disktosser | December 25, 2008 5:15 PM
Ah, another cake-and-eat-it-too case.
If it's a personal improvement training session, Diskeeper has a better case, but Scientology itself insists it is a religion
Posted by: jay | December 25, 2008 5:48 PM
"Basic Study Manual"; the guy doesn't want to learn a new way of studying. His task is to learn it. But no! He refuses to learn a way of studying. Then he sues the company because he refuses! HA !
Posted by: Terryeo | December 25, 2008 5:48 PM
What needs to happen is that Diskeeper, and all other Scientology centered businesses, should be boycotted. Scientology maintains its right to spread its influence and control and actively goes out of its way to promote itself within the circles of wealth and influence within this nation.
What better way to gain leverage than to insert a trojan or worm as part of the defragmentation program. I don't trust the bastards and think it would be better to keep Scientology as far from my life, community and my computer as possible.
Does anyone have a list of businesses or products connected to Scientology?
Posted by: Art | December 25, 2008 6:04 PM
It sounds like Disckeeper's lawyers have explicitly conceded that the training in question is religious in nature.
Usually Scientologists (and other religions that engage in these sort of practices) claim that the training is just about personal habits and group dynamics.
If they've conceded the religion is religious in nature I'm pretty sure they'll lose.
Posted by: Ian Gould | December 25, 2008 7:27 PM
Sounds more benign than Aum Shinrikyo (Japanese/international religious cult/terrorist org) getting government software contracts as low bidder due to having competent programming staff working for free. But similarly their software will always run the risk of being compromised and unsafe due to their groups' goals not being at all benign.
As a labour issue this seems pretty straightforward, not much to say there really, just hope they can gut it out.
Posted by: rsm | December 25, 2008 8:32 PM
Just checking Diskeeper's web page and the one about its founder "entrepreneur and humanitarian" Craig Jensen (whose motto is "Whatever you do, help others". You have to wonder what the negative publicity over this case will do for company sales. Especially if they're exposed as a front for Scientology.
Posted by: Romeo Vitelli | December 25, 2008 8:39 PM
Has Anonymous weighed in on this?
Seriously, I hope the plaintiffs' lawyers can hold out to the end on this one. I think they can win, but you can bet it will be a long time before any checks get written. And do see Bowfinger everyone.
But the Scientologists are just amateurs compared to these guys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kScJB63PBOI&feature=channel_page
Posted by: Bacopa | December 25, 2008 11:07 PM
In what way is this different (other than degree of proselytizing aggression) than my workplace (a US gov agency) sending me to Covey's "7 Habits" course, also religious at its base although not overtly so in content? I mean this comment not to absolve Scientology but to point out the degree to which religion is given access to mandatory professional development courses.
Posted by: Russell | December 26, 2008 1:30 AM
I just want to say Happy Monkey.
Posted by: mike h | December 26, 2008 5:34 AM
-All real religions that I know of are given away for free. Scientology makes you pay thousands of dollars for it. -
I believe you should look up the word tithe...then the word guilt.
Posted by: Richard Eis | December 26, 2008 6:36 AM
In my opinion the largest threat for California are cataclysms and ecological catastrophes. Not important is how many money we have because one tragedy can us take all.
Posted by: alufelgi chromowane | December 26, 2008 6:42 AM
Never mind the compulsory Scientology indoctrination, their products are totally over-hyped and they underperform.
I'm glad to see that even Microsoft has finally dropped the Diskeeper version of its defrag utility and replaced it with one of its own utilities.
Religion in the workplace *has* to be voluntary in order to protect freedom of association. If (say) a Jew wants to work for a Catholic charity he should be able to do so without being persecuted or forced to attend mass, as long as he is doing his job effectively. You can't be fired for refusing to attend mass. Excommunicated, maybe, but not fired; excommunicating a non-Catholic is a moot point anyway. Of course, if the employee is made to feel uncomfortable for his refusal, that's a problem, but only one of many that happen in the workplace.
It seems from the Diskeeper case that they were fired for the equivalent of refusing to attend mass. What I want to know is why were they hired in the first place, and why did they consent to be hired? Was there so much deception going on in the interviewing process that they didn't know the extent of the Scientology practice in the company?
If their inteviewing process is anything like their marketing, then the answer is probably that they were misled. I fail to understand how a company can hope to keep customers after misleading them with consistently overblown marketing, but Diskeeper consistently overmarkets their products, and as a result they lost me as a client/subscriber.
Posted by: Donn Edwards | December 26, 2008 6:55 AM
Donn,
They were probably hired as reasonably fit for the job and as possible recruits. Tom Cruise can't just keep making babies to swell the ranks and when you consider that only the weakest of minds and lowest of self-esteemed get sucked in, they surely need new blood.
Posted by: Mike | December 26, 2008 7:31 AM
Here's an even more blatant example. I know a young Catholic couple who, when they went to get their daughter baptized, were told that they didn't have a sufficient history of tithing for her to get baptized in the church. Both came from families that tithed regularly, but since the couple was still young (early 20's) and with a new baby, one could easily understand how money would be tight, and how paying for a new home and the basics of starting their life together would be a significant drain on their finances for the first few years of marriage.
But this didn't stop the priest from using the threat of eternal damnation of the daughter as leverage to try to coerce them into tithing more regularly and with more money.
They even talked with a more senior priest at their church, and he agreed with them that the other priest had crossed a line. But in the end, he was apparently unwilling to go against the decision made by another priest in the parish.
Well, I guess you could say that this started them on the road to free thinking, so something good eventually did come out of it.
Posted by: doctorgoo | December 26, 2008 8:36 AM
Plaintiffs are absolutely correct. Scientology has a whole program for administering on-the-job performance and productivity, modeled on L. Ron Clueless's idea of what the US Navy SHOULD have been run with, along with a heaping cup of woo psychology and a pinch of Satanism. (I have nothing against Satanists; since I happen to be a stone cold atheist myself I don't think they are any better or worse than any other religious nuts.)
I worked for a small firm that used "the Tech" on us. They did not require us to go to "classes," but they made us agree that we would go if we were sent (I didn't know what the nature of the classes were). They were obnoxious about recruiting and obnoxious about forcing their stupid cult on our personal lives. I accidentally broke a part of a project on the shop floor, and when I got called up on the carpet for it, was actually told that my husband was a PTS (look it up) and unless I left him I was out of a job. If the total amount of work I did at the end of the week wasn't greater than the amount I did the week before, I wasn't "rewarded" with the raw materials I needed to do my work in the next week. Sometimes we were assigned written work that required us to use Scientology materials to complete. We had no health insurance because all health problems were supposed to have been "self-caused," so calling in sick was technically an infraction.
It was all just so STUPID.
Posted by: speedwell | December 26, 2008 1:26 PM
I don't understand that doctorgoo Catholics don't tithe. At least not here in Holy Catholic Ireland. (And you know they would if they could.)
Posted by: Una | December 27, 2008 2:19 PM
Here's an even more blatant example. I know a young Catholic couple who, when they went to get their daughter baptized, were told that they didn't have a sufficient history of tithing for her to get baptized in the church
This is a bit different. You can go to a Catholic church every week, you can read and study Catholicism all want (maybe just pay normal prices for books), you can share your knowledge with others... and no one charges you.
Becoming a member involves supporting its costs and is a step that many voluntary organizations do. It's far from the abusive pricing, and legal haranging you get from Scientology.
Posted by: jay | December 28, 2008 10:17 AM
speedwell writes:
Blake, company motivational speaker, Glengarry Glen Ross:
Posted by: Ex-drone | December 29, 2008 8:02 AM