Q&A: Switching a Shift with a Secular Coworker on the Sabbath
Switching a Shift with a Secular Coworker on the Sabbath
Question
I work at a high-tech company.
My team has an on-call rotation for customer support.
They ask me to find a replacement for Saturdays when I’m not available.
Usually there are no urgent problems, but sometimes there are also emergency call-ins outside working hours.
Is it permissible to ask another employee to be on call on the Sabbath instead of me?
Answer
I don’t understand how you yourself do this. Is there a matter of saving a life involved there? If not, then you may not work at this. If there is someone willing to work at it, then he is not replacing you, but making his own decision for himself. You may not do this work.
Discussion on Answer
In my humble opinion, the Rabbi read the question incorrectly. He is not doing the desecration himself.
A comma should be added to make it clear:
“They ask me to find a replacement for Sabbaths, when I am not available.”
That is, it’s not that on some Sabbaths he is available and on some he is not, but rather that on every Sabbath he is unavailable.
That makes no difference. When you are looking for a replacement, that means that in principle you work on Sabbaths and the replacement is yours. If the company employs people on Sabbaths and you are assigned work only on weekdays, that is a different matter.
Rabbi, as someone who comes from the high-tech world, this practice is standard in all companies. It’s well known that there are on-call shifts on the Sabbath because the product needs 24/7 availability, which requires maintenance when there are urgent problems (ones that cannot be delayed).
At the company where I worked, they would initially build the on-call schedule so that the religious employees did not get on-call duty from Friday afternoon until after the Sabbath. As a result, someone who does not observe the Sabbath was on call during those hours.
By the way, there are also people on call on Yom Kippur.