Juno News - December 08, 2025


Federal employees asked to schedule breaks around those observing Ramadan


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

175.74193

Word count

227

Sentence count

10

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

How would you feel at work if you were told to stop taking coffee breaks in order to show solidarity with Muslims observing Ramadan? This is exactly what federal employees are being asked to do. This directive was given in response to a complaint from the volunteer group, Muslim Federal Employees. This group stated that they feel they are not receiving the same level of federal support that was given to the Ukrainian community during the Ukraine-Russia situation. They also said they feel unsafe expressing their Palestinian identity at work due to fears of retaliation and potential harm.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 How would you feel at work if you were told to stop taking coffee breaks in order to show
00:00:04.020 solidarity with Muslims observing Ramadan? This is exactly what federal employees are being asked
00:00:09.780 to do. Managers at Ottawa's IT department are recommending that staff stop taking coffee breaks
00:00:15.340 for a month to show solidarity with their Muslim employees. Although Muslims only represent a 1.00
00:00:20.760 fraction of the staff, only roughly 100 employees in the department self-identified as Muslim out
00:00:26.380 of the 9,393 total staff, and even among those 100, not all of them observed the religious holiday.
00:00:33.840 Shared Services Canada managers issued an email to staff telling them to avoid scheduling lunches
00:00:39.060 or informal coffee breaks and chats, as this could unintentionally put their Muslim colleagues in an 0.99
00:00:44.680 uncomfortable position. Now, this entire directive was given in response to a complaint from members
00:00:50.180 of the volunteer group Muslim Federal Employees. This group stated that they feel Muslims are not
00:00:55.300 receiving the same level of federal support that was given to the Ukrainian community during the
00:01:00.360 Ukraine-Russia situation. They also said they feel unsafe expressing their Palestinian identity
00:01:06.340 at work due to fears of retaliation and potential harm. If you guys like to read more about this
00:01:12.280 story, make sure to visit chununews.com. As well, I'd love to hear your thoughts, so make sure to
00:01:16.980 leave a comment.