Vigilant employers are already on the lookout for age, sexual, and racial discrimination within their stores. According to a report released by the United States’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), religious discrimination is also becoming a problem at many workplaces.

The report, released in the summer of 2008, states that over the past 15 years—from 1992 to 2007—religious discrimination has doubled, causing the EEOC to issue a new Compliance Manual Section regarding workplace discrimination on the basis of religion.

Under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII already prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals because of their religion in hiring, firing, and other terms and conditions of employment. The new section does not unveil any new policies or procedures, according to The Workplace Word, a newsletter produced by Snell & Wilmer LLP, a law-firm based in Arizona, but serves as a resource for understanding religious discrimination and how to prevent and resolve it.

The EEOC also reports that in fiscal 2007 alone it obtained more than $6.4 million for individuals charging religious discrimination. Surprisingly, this amount did not include any awards from litigation, but represented the amount the EEOC was able to negotiate through its mediation programs.

Patrick L. Clancy, an attorney with Venable LLP in Rockville, Maryland, is one of many attorneys familiar with the issue of religious discrimination.

For more than 20 years, Clancy has practiced employment law, counseling and representing employers on their employment policies and practices. Clancy’s job is a proactive one. He ensures that the companies he represents have the right practices and policies in place.

While the numbers show a rise, Clancy says religious discrimination complaints are a relatively smaller percentage compared to other workplace discrimination charges such as race, sex, disability, and age. But he is not surprised complaints are increasing.

“One of the things we are seeing today, whether it is an individual store or restaurant or on the corporate level, is an increase in diversity in the workplace,” he says.

It is because of this rise in diversity that Lobna “Luby” Ismail, founder and president of Connecting Cultures, works to train corporations like Disney, Marriott, and CVS Pharmacy on religious and cultural diversity.

“As an Arab-American, I always found myself helping Americans understand Arabs,” she says, “while at the same time helping my parents and family to understand Americans and American culture.”

Ismail credits the problems with workplace religious discrimination to a lack of understanding and awareness. Employers do not understand the law and as a result create and nurture friction between employees, Ismail says.

According to EEOC, there are four types of employment discrimination that relate to religion: failure to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs in the workplace where it would not be an undue hardship to do so; disparate treatment/disparate impact—treating someone differently because of his/her religion, either intentionally or by the use of a standard that statistically results in discrimination; harassment of an employee due to his/her religious beliefs; and retaliation against an employee for attempting to invoke his/her rights to freedom from religious discrimination or for participating in a proceeding relating to someone else’s invocation of those rights.

“Employees are required to accommodate their employees, based on the law,” Ismail says. “When employees take lunch and smoke breaks there is not an issue. But when an observer of Ramandan needs to get off early, it is not because they are trying to get the job over with.”

According to the EEOC, accommodation is the largest subset of religious discrimination claims. The most common types of requested accommodations are scheduling changes due to inability to work certain days or the need for prayer breaks and relaxing of dress codes. An employer, states the guidelines, may reasonably require the employee to find other people willing to swap shifts, rather than taking the responsibility personally.

It is an issue that Ismail believes is taking place on all levels in the fast-food industry and America as a whole. She says the restaurant industry, and more specifically quick-serve restaurants are but a small microcosm of what is going on in the world.

Ismail says education is a solution.

“And not just managers, employees need to be educated as well,” she says. “By educating everyone, you create and nurture a hostile-free environment.”

Gerald Fernandez, president of the Multicultural Foodservice & Hospitality Alliance suggests a diversity program where faith and religion is openly addressed in the workplace.

“It is a good first start,” Fernandez says. “I have been in conferences where it has come up, but no one wants to go out publicly and discuss what is going on.”

Clancy likes to believe his clients are conscientious and good people.

“Their concern is more so about not knowing what to do,” he says. “And certainly there can be circumstances where this is the case.”

He suggests employers develop a strong nondiscrimination and harassment policy that clearly states that the employer will not tolerate discrimination of any kind in the workplace.

“That policy should also include a mechanism for reporting incidents to more than one person,” he says. “When you have more than one person available to report to, it keeps the situation ethical.”

He also suggests that once that policy is developed, it be publicized someplace where all employees can see it.

Still, some businesses like Chick-fil-A are known for their emphasis on religious values.

According to Don Perry, vice president of public relations, the Cathy family has always incorporated biblical principles into the workplace.

“These are simply fundamental principles of good morals and values behavior,” he says, “the most obvious of these would be our closed-on-Sundays policy to allow for the life principle of rest and worship if elected.”

Andy Lorenzen, senior manager for human resources, adds that franchisees and the Chick-fil-A corporation make employment decisions in compliance with all federal, state, and local laws.