Here’s another story about nurses being told that they cannot work with patients for reasons unrelated to their skills per se — in this case it is about the nurse’s gender rather than race, though. A male registered nurse says that he was fired because some Muslim people in his community of Dearborn, MI were uncomfortable with him treating Muslim women.
John Benitez Jr. filed a sex discrimination suit Wednesday in Detroit U.S. District Court after getting the go-ahead from the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a “right to sue” letter Oct. 19.
[…]
In a complaint filed on his behalf, his lawyer, Deborah L. Gordon, said Benitez joined Dearborn’s Health Department in September 2010. The 63-year-old Madison Heights resident has a three-decade nursing career. Dearborn has a large Muslim community and one of the largest Arab immigrant communities in the U.S.
Soon after starting work, Gordon said a Muslim supervisor told Benitez to refer patients wearing hijab to her, rather than treating them himself.The complaint said Benitez complied until Nov. 17, 2010, when a doctor saw what he was doing and questioned him “about the cumbersome and unusual practice of taking women wearing a head scarf to the nursing supervisor for care,” rather than going ahead and treating them. The complaint said Benitez then began complying with the new instruction that he treat women wearing hijab.
On Dec. 1, 2010, Gordon said Benitez was fired. She said he was told it was “not because of any performance problem, but was instead carried out because the clinic’s conservative male Muslim clientele did not want a male treating female patients.”
Tags: dearborn, detroit, hijab, muslim, nurse, nurses, Nursing