A Beastly Situation

Women love handbags. They appear not to be too concerned about pricing in their absorption with owning beautiful handbags. Fabricating and marketing handbags seems an assured way to operate a successful business enterprise. And there is a Montreal-based designer of women's handbags whose abhorrence of the use of animal skins to produce them, leads this company to manufacture handbags made entirely of vegetarian-based materials.

The company, Matt & Nat, produce their animal-free, faux leather purses and belts in recognition of the owners' vegetarian philosophy. In fact, it's hard to tell the faux from the real thing. The business employs eighteen to produce their product and pride themselves on being a vegan business. This reflects the owners' scruples, for they are themselves strictly vegetarian.

When hiring employees they make it quite clear that they do not welcome meat or fish on their premises. Employees know the rules and if they bag their lunch to their workplace they are free to bring what they will, sans meat. "But no, we do not police it; we do not go around checking people's lunches and people do make mistakes."

Employees can take their lunch at the variety of non-vegetarian restaurants in the area, or eat their meat lunches on nearby street benches. They also have the option of taking part in the company's meat-free potluck lunches. There is also a library of vegetarian cookbooks that anyone is free to peruse for inspiration.

Now, a disgruntled former employee is thinking of taking her dissatisfaction with her former employer's policy to the Quebec Human Rights Commission, claiming her human rights were violated. One can only breathe a sigh of relief that the Quebec Human Rights Commission felt the complaint to be 'interesting', but declined to investigate it as a human rights issue.

In an interview on the CBC, the woman, who insisted on anonymity (for herself, not the company), explained "It's a free country. I think we should eat what we want." Right. So why, when the terms of employment were explained did this woman use her free will to accept the job? It's a free country; she could have looked elsewhere for employment.

That would have spared her from the nasty business of sneaking meat into her purse, hiding it in her car to circumvent the company's vegetarian-only policy. And it would also have spared the rest of us of having to hear about this pernicious nuisance complaint.