EEOC Sues Texas Ice Cream Maker Over Firing of Jewish Man Who Wouldn’t Shave His Beard
Blue Bell’s own lawyers allegedly said the company was required to accommodate his beard with a special mask—it arrived ten days after he was fired.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Blue Bell Creameries after it fired a Jewish body-shop technician who refused to shave his beard for religious reasons.
According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, the Texas-based ice cream company terminated Gary Blackshear in March 2025, less than a month after he told his supervisor he would not shave his beard because of his religious beliefs.
Blackshear worked at Blue Bell’s Sylacauga, Alabama, production facility refurbishing fiberglass parts on the company fleet.
The company said that work requires a respirator that “completely seals”—and Blackshear was asked to shave his beard.
However, the lawsuit says some of his coworkers had similar beards and weren’t told to shave—even though they were doing similar work.
According to the complaint, Blackshear’s fleet manager and the company’s safety coordinator both questioned whether he was really Jewish.
When Blackshear said he wouldn’t shave his beard because of his religion, the safety coordinator allegedly told him he would have to do so anyway and that it didn’t matter that he is Jewish, because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was “above that.”
In fact, the lawsuit says Blue Bell’s own lawyers advised the company that Blackshear must be accommodated with a mask to fit over his beard. Blue Bell says it ordered one—only it arrived ten days after he was fired.
Blue Bell said it fired Blackshear for “theft of company time” after two brief absences on a single day—18 minutes to get food for his coworkers and seven minutes to bring food to his son—during which, the company said, he left the premises without permission or clocking out.
And, here again, the lawsuit says other employees who engaged in similar conduct were given warnings, but not fired.
The EEOC complaint calls all this a pretext for retaliating and discriminating against Blackshear, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It asks the court for an injunction and an order requiring Blue Bell to correct its policies and for monetary damages.
The lawsuit comes after the parties failed to reach a settlement through EEOC’s conciliation procedures. It’s the latest in a series of cases following Trump’s executive orders to combat anti-Christian bias and antisemitism in the workplace, including actions against Apple, Dollar General, and Columbia University.
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Comments
The management and lawyer idiots at blue bunny should’ve transferred stupid, recalcitrant Jewish worker to shipping and receiving.
Close the damn shop and hire a third party to do all the work.
Get stuffed. The worked isn’t “stupid” for asking that his employer accommodate his religious beliefs, as it is required to do, by law and common sense.
Nah; it seems obvious that the stupid one is you.
He’s an idiot for trying to work with fiberglass without protection and is inviting respiratory disease. The fact that they ordered a mask, even if it arrived late, actually suggests that he was fired for a different cause other than his beliefs, but the devil will be in the details that aren’t apparent in this brief article.
He wasn’t trying to work without protection. He asked for a reasonable accommodation, a mask that would protect him with his beard. The law required them to make that accommodation. While waiting for it to arrive they assigned him to other work.
The complaint is only 13 pages, and lays out what the EEOC is alleging. According to the EEOC the company’s lawyer told it to order the mask, but the company decided to get back at the employee for complaining, and for standing on his rights.
Sure that’s alleged. It could also be that he wasn’t a reliable worker and this is an angle to work.
I’m not seeing that he was assigned other work, but I may have overlooked something.
Case seems odd. You’d think if a beard was a problem that’d be raised during any employment interview. Or is the problem not the beard per se, but the Jewishness, with the beard just the pretext?
You don’t know what your are talking about. I’ll educate you.
Body shop work, and especially fiberglass workers always wear dusk masks, airfed respiratory gear etc. I’ve done body shop work and worked in a spray booth. You’ve never done such things. So, shut up.
Dummy previously only gained experience by working in a shop. Dummy was wearing dust masks while apprenticing his trade. Dummy found god and decided to grow a huge beard. Dummy then demands that others pay for his religious dumb-fckry.
Did you mean to respond above me? I agree with you that you shouldn’t work with fiberglass without a mask.
Note: Blue Bell employees are touchy about being referred to as upstart Blue Bunny.
(Oh yeah, you bet I took the tour.)
People are angry with me for the obvious – body shop guy had sudden Religion Beard Growth in a trade that uses air fed respirators, dust masks etc etc.
And then he makes others buy special gear for him so he can work. Because he’s a scammer.
Mohammad entered the chat.
Hear, hear!
The fact that the mask was already on order suggests to me that the company was perfectly willing to accommodate this guy’s religion. And he wasn’t fired for not shaving, he was fired for taking personal time on the company clock.
I suspect when all is said and done, this will be another case of a manager who fired a guy for having a d*k attitude in general, despite his being more lenient with other co-workers for similar offenses because they did not have a d*k attitude. Then the guy decided to play his equivalent of the race card, because that’s what someone with attitude does.
Same. That actually works in their favor. It’s not like you can return a mask that was specifically fitted to one person’s face.
What doesn’t work in their favor ia firing him for actions others did with no penalty, after the lawyers said to accomodate him and ESPECIALLY after asking him if he’s “really Jewish”. The first looks pretextual and the second is a violation of the law.
More Law-itis. Let’s be honest: the civil rights acts, etc. destroyed freedom in this country. So frankly, I’m tired of living under the boot of the “do-gooders” and would prefer to be free.
It was alleged that others had no penalty. It remains to be seen whether his lawyer’s claims are true.
The complaint is that they fired him in retaliation for standing on his rights. That was the “dick attitude”. How dare he make waves, how dare he embarrass the manager, how dare he impose his rights on the company. They ordered the mask, even though the manager at first told him they didn’t need to, because their lawyer informed them the manager was wrong. He probably got a talking to about it. So he decided to get rid of him and set about looking for a pretext. But the law specifically forbids that.
I read it the same way. The few minutes off the floor hardly seems like a legitimate reason to fire somebody who had been with the company for almost 6 years. Sounds like the manager was the one with the attitude problem.
What the complaint won’t mention is how much of a pain in the tuchus this fellow may or may not have been with respect to every OTHER interaction he had with his managers and co-workers, and for how long this has been going on.
I know it’s all an assumption-laden crapshoot, but without ever having met the guy, that’s where I’d put my money.
Agreed. For all we know this guy tried to use his potential discrimination suit as way to bully his manager by basically blackmailing him into ignoring other violations of workplace policy. All tribal grievance cards should be declined without direct evidence of specific intent to discriminate and especially where there’s another valid reason for the adverse decision other than ‘discrimination’. Otherwise we continue to provide privilege based on group/tribal ID which we don’t offer to an agnostic, straight white male.
“Tribal grievance card”?
Seriously?
Sure, tribe/group/collective based on some characteristic whatever you wanna call it as a.generic term for ‘I’m an XYZ (insert whatever you want) thus deserving of special treatment and absolutely immune to consequences.
You’re not advocating for tribalism are you? A system where we spit up into demographic, cultural and religious sub groups with each tribe demanding ‘their share’ of resources and very often the larger or more aggressive tribes taking more than ‘their fair share’ from the weaker, less aggressive or smaller groups.
If you allow any “other valid reason for the adverse decision” then you’ve killed the law, because there will always be some pretext they can find. That’s why we look at how other people in the same situation were treated. If they always fire anyone who dares to take even a ten-minute break then fine and well, but if they don’t then that’s obviously not their reason now.
It’s the same when someone fires a protected whistleblower. They always find a pretext but the law sees past that.
Well yes and no. I offered up a scenario where the manager ‘turned over a new leaf’ on enforcing the petty infractions that had historically been let slide. So in that scenario the past is irrelevant b/c the manager is now gonna be a hard ass from X date forward and the current day enforcement regime is what becomes relevant.
I can definitely see a system where a manager finds a pretext to ‘go after someone’ b/c there truly is almost always something but if the ‘pretext’ is actually an enforced policy applied consistently then it ain’t a ‘pretext’.
What we must not allow is creating an incentive for a situation where some employee invokes a tribal grievance card and that act then confers immunity or unfair special lax treatment for policy violations that are applied to other employees.
“7 minutes to bring food to his son”
Does his son go to school in the parking lot?
In these cases the plaintiff can argue that the stated reason was just a pretext.
Are the Muslims asked to shave their beards??
My question as well.
Certainly. And they go through the same crap. This happens routinely, to Jews, Moslems, Sikhs, and any other religion that requires or encourages beards. There’s no employer that treats them differently.
My question is Blue Bell was obviously aware of an issue between him and his manager. Company lawyers had to step in and correct the manager once. So when the manager fired him why didn’t the same lawyers go over it with a fine tooth comb to make sure it was not retaliation because any jury that looks at this will see retaliation. Especially any jurors who have worked for a dick manager before.
Consider the possibility that the lawyers did exactly that, and declared it a clean shoot.
Wait 48 hours and find out stuff that isn’t in the complainant’s lawyer’s press release.
Exactly. The compliant is the plaintiff’s version of events presented by them in a curated manner. It ain’t a neutral recitation of everything that went on. For all we know everyone involved is a jerk or maybe the manager really is a bigoted ahole, perhaps the employee is trying to get one over on his former company b/c he’s butthurt. Maybe both.
Or the manager sacked him without telling the legal department.
Yes, if it goes into Discovery they’ll discover the employee was likely a malcontent.
This is why many large corporations take firing people out of the hands of supervisors and have procedures for firing that must include write ups so there is a chain of evidence that supports the firing.
This is also why you can never be lenient to only some people. If you punish someone in one way for leaving while on the clock you have to punish everyone the same way. Otherwise you can possibly open yourself to claims of favoritism and discrimination.
And all of this doesn’t matter if the employee is a #$%^ or the manager is one or they both are. The moment you show favoritism or discrimination you open the door to possible liability. The fact the company lawyers said to order the mask and the mask was actually ordered makes the company look worse especially if he can show he was harassed because of because of his religion. And than fired.
I suspect his manager and that safety person are the “just asking questions” type of people based on the whole asking if he’s really Jewish thing.
Blue Bell is run by dummies. You don’t let the lower level managers do dumb stuff like this.
Blue Bell has never recovered from the 2015 Listeria contamination scandal when they weren’t cleaning their equipment properly. They lost a ton of market share and have been a kind of crappy company ever since. I don’t eat their product any more and this episode just reinforces my feeling that they are just not a very reputable company anymore.
Isn’t BB the one referenced in BCS?
(Saul Goodman asks for Blue Bell ice cream in his plea deal).
Who would want to eat this garbage anyway? And added to the garbage ice cream we can add a sprinkle of antisemitism. And in addition the company is based in a state so lacking in integrity and intelligence that it might elect Talarico. If you’re low enough to turn a blind eye to that, then you might as well give Ben & Jerry’s your money.
If you are conceding Texas as a lost cause then you might as well give every federal election to the Dems for the foreseeable future.
Since we only have the plaintiff’s allegations, we don’t have the full story. My personal feelings on this, regardless of the law, is that it’s wrong to make an employer subsidize and employee’s religious practice. If you have to pay $800 for a piece of equipment vs $40 to accommodate a religious belief, you’re falling right back into that trap of treating employers as if they were parents.
What are you talking about $800 v $40? The law requires reasonable accommodations. A $760 different in cost doesn’t seem reasonable.
The accommodation b/c of the beard preventing a good seal on standard low cost respirator would likely require a Powered Air Purifying Respirator with hood. 3M has one for $2300. Consumables like hood ($100) and filter ($80) are ongoing expenses. FWIW that’s the low price model.
“the lawsuit says some of his coworkers had similar beards and weren’t told to shave”
Did those “similar” beards also required a specialty custom mask? Or maybe they were not “similar” after all.
Racism, antisemitism, and all other kinds of bigotry are wrong, have no place in this society.
But let’s not fool ourselves. This case has all the bells and whistles of a pain-in-the-A employee that finally got canned. Now he gets to play the {fill-in-the-blank} card. This is no different IMO, than a lazy employee getting fired then suing because he or she is {fill-in-the-blank}.
A law that can be abused is bad law.
I see their ice cream on the store shelves. Usually the lower cost of the bunch.
But a lower cost implies lower quality, so I’ve spent the little extra for the good stuff.
“”Did those “similar” beards also required a specialty custom mask? Or maybe they were not “similar” after all.””
A point not made elsewhere. There’s a big difference between a neatly trimmed 1″ beard and something that hangs down to your nipples.
And that length matters matters for the ability of the mask to seal securely and whether a much more expensive powered air respirator with a hood/helmet is required.
When Blackshear said he wouldn’t shave his beard because of his religion, the safety coordinator allegedly told him he would have to do so anyway and that it didn’t matter that he is Jewish, because the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration was “above that.”
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agree with this–what difference does it make whether a beard wearer is jewish, christian, muslim, martian ?–the work requires wearing a mask that will completely seal the respiratory system from the fiberglass debris/particulate generated by the process–is a very real danger of working with the stuff–whether he trims his beard to accomodate the available masks or the company acquires a ” custom ” mask to accomodate his particular beard (other people’s beards do not matter if their masks seal as required) it is the rule / law for the specific type of actiity he is to perform–the company is under no obligation to allow an employee to perform work in an unsafe manner in violation of osha regulations–if they allow the violation then the company is also open to liability for any injuries / health issues ensuing from his activity–no thanks
get him his own mask and he pays part of the cost (to demonstrate his commitment) or transfer him to another area
The company is required to offer a reasonable accommodation (mask). They are not required to transfer him to a different job.
They are also not required to employ him at that particular job. While they can’t terminate him, they don’t have to make him a machine operator.
Or he could purchase the much more expensive mask himself. FWIW 3M has several with a hood or helmet that are OSHA approved for dudes with beards. Cheapest model was $3K. That’s a significant cost increase from basic respirator and IMO unreasonable.