Hand Scanners Spark Bible Belt Religion Bias Suits

Biometric technology clashes with religious belief in two cases from the Bible Belt that allege businesses wrongfully fired employees who refused to put their hands on a scanner for timekeeping purposes.

A former van driver for Hertz Corp. and two former nursing home employees filed the suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for an employee’s religion unless doing so would create an “undue hardship.”

But no published opinion has addressed whether an employer should accommodate those who believe a biometric “hand geometry” scanner will stamp them with the “Mark of the Beast.” The Book of Revelation warns believers not to take the “Mark of the Beast” on their foreheads or on their right hands.

In the complaint filed Feb. 27 in Atlanta, former Hertz employee Anthony Amos says he refused to participate in a timekeeping system which “involved the placement of a right hand on a digital scanner machine.” He advised his boss of his “religious issues” but was fired a week later.

The two former employees of Arbor Place, a Puryear, Tenn., nursing home, filed their suit last week, alleging their “sincerely held religious beliefs” prohibited them from using a similar biometric system.

“Plaintiffs requested a reasonable accomodation which would allow them to record their time by an alternative method,” the complaint says. “Instead of providing a reasonable accommodation ... Defendant terminated Plaintiffs' employment.”

Some employers in the U.S. have allowed believers to put the left hand, rather than the right, on the scanner. But the plaintiffs in the two cases do not indicate whether that accommodation was offered to them.

In a Canadian labor grievance case, an arbitrator ruled in January that an Ontario company “never seriously addressed the question of what it could do to accommodate” three employees apart from allowing the use of the left hand. The employees declined that option.

“[T]he accommodation sought by the Union and the Grievors –- that the Grievors use the biometric scanner with a swipe card and password, without its biometric features –- does not impose an undue hardship on the Employer,” the arbitrator concluded.

The Employment Relations Authority of New Zealand came to a different conclusion in 2004, finding no basis for a discrimination claim because the biometric technology does not actually stamp a mark on a person, or even store the image of a fingerprint.

The scanner measures the dimensions of a hand, which it converts to an algorithm of a nine-digit number. Each successive time the hand is placed on the scanner, it is measured and compared to the algorithm stored in the system.

But U.S. law does not require employees to justify their beliefs no matter how extreme they may appear, the only test being whether they are “sincerely held.” And no less an authority than Pat Robertson has denounced biometrics.

“The Bible says the time is going to come that you cannot buy or sell except with a mark placed on your hand or on your forehead,” he told viewers of his TV show “The 700 Club” in 1995. “It is happening, ladies and gentlemen, exactly according to the Book of Revelation.”

By Matthew Heller
3/28/07