I have mixed feelings about this because on the one hand, workers pushing back against flagrant and careless replacement and displacement is a good thing. On the other hand, doing it via individual religious exemption here and there does not come any closer to proletarian power or better workers’ rights enshrined in law. It just does the usual capitalist thing of offloading system level problems to individual responsibility. Even if this works for some people, it’s not going to work for everybody and organized capital has far more power to ensure that than some individuals claiming religious exemption at a job. If it becomes a successful trend, capital’s first move will likely be to quietly hire less people who seem likely to make such a claim and use automation to help them choose.

The position workers are in is Sisyphean when they don’t have collective power and until they are more organized, capital can essentially point and laugh, and ignore the hit of some individuals going outside the norm.