About a week ago, a member of the kitchen staff at popular clean-eating restaurant Gló, which is located downtown, was fired for not being vegan, Stundin reports.
According to the reporter, who had read the letter of dismissal, the reason behind the termination of contract was related to the fact that “the restaurant is in the process of becoming a vegan restaurant, and it therefore requires members of staff in the kitchen to be vegan, too.”
Until now, Gló has featured chicken and dairy products prominently in their menu, often attracting the ire of customers who felt it was unethical and misleading to market the restaurant as vegetarian. Times, however, are changing.
“We’ll be turning the place into a vegan restaurant,” owner Sólveig Eiriksdóttir told Stundin. “That has been the idea for a long time. So the only thing we ask of our staff is that they have an interest in veganism.”
Despite the unambiguous statements found in the letter of dismissal, Sólla insisted that no particular dietary requirments are needed to work for Gló, and that the letter itself had been written in a misleading way.
In the past few years, Iceland has been working towards tightening the legal frameworks concerning discrimination in the workplace in order to further protect workers’ rights. All gender discrimination in the workplace is illegal in Iceland, but the Minister of Social Affairs and Equality Ásmundur Einar Daðason has also been working on a bill that would make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and nationality illegal. As of now, however, nobody has mentioned discrimination on the basis of dietary needs. Who will protect the rights of the omnivores in the workplace? And what about those with food intolerances? We’ll see where the future takes us.
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