AMS Annual Meeting – Certification for Religion-Based Harassment Training

In order to encourage attendance at our annual meeting each year, AMS presents a series of speakers addressing issues of interest to the maritime industry, including: regulatory compliance, substance abuse issues, maritime safety, and workplace harassment prevention.

Harassment prevention presents a special challenge to the maritime industry due to the increasing diversity of its workforce and the close quarters in which mariners operate. Federal decisional law seeks to limit claims to some extent by requiring that hostile work environment claimants satisfy an objective standard, i.e., that the conduct was offensive to a “reasonable person” belonging to the protected class in question (e.g., the reasonable woman, the reasonable African-American, the reasonable Egyptian).

Federal courts have evinced some reluctance to apply the “reasonable person” standard to religion-based claims – perhaps because a person’s religious beliefs may be subjective and self-defining. To some extent, recent decisions in this field tend to deviate from Supreme Court precedent.

The October 15th annual meeting will include a presentation on religion-based hostile work environment claims and attendees at the meeting will receive the attached training certificate to reflect their participation (see attachment).

Certificate of Participation