By Priscilla DeGregory and Bruce Golding
(NY POST) Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital discriminated against three Muslim maintenance workers by requiring that they cut their beards to pass “fit testing” for N95 safety masks, according to a suit filed Wednesday.
The Manhattan Supreme Court filing came less than 16 months after a Post expose about nurses wearing trash bags to protect themselves from the coronavirus at sister hospital Mount Sinai West sparked widespread outrage that included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) denouncing the situation during a speech in the US Capitol.
Wednesday’s suit claims that other Mount Sinai workers, “including Orthodox Jews,” are “able to maintain a beard and were not were not similarly required to pass an N-95 fit test.”
It also alleges that Jeffrey Cohen, vice president for labor relations and human resources for the Mount Sinai Health System, made the “devout” Muslim men get a letter from a religious leader to “prove” they needed fist-length beards to comply with their “sincerely held” beliefs.
Cohen, who is named as a defendant, is accused of saying that “religion is one of those things that if you look you can find an opinion that meets your expectations” and that he didn’t want a “situation…where there are particular people who don’t have to abide by fit testing.”
“No explanation was given as to why the fit testing requirement was suddenly being enforced after almost a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, and over six months after Mount Sinai Hospital System created a policy against allowing the use of the religious exemption for facial hair on the basis that it ‘obtained special dispensations from religious organizations,” court papers say.
