Furthermore, does any company or organisation ever act on the strength of a single complaint? Can they be sure that this is not a vindictive complaint that has more to do with personal issues than anything to do with a religious symbol? None of us know, but the fact that they admit to having had ONE complaint seems to me to suggest an over-reaction by the organisation.
I think you'll find that they have to act on the strength of a single formal complaint, because their policy says that they will do so. The action taken would simply be to tell the driver to remove the object. I agree that it seems petty, but the whole point of having a policy is that, once the rules are written down, then everybody knows what the rules are, and can stick to them. A policy protects the management from being criticised for discrimination or harassment of employees. If the policy is always followed, then any contravention of it will be dealt with in the same way. If the policy is ignored because one employee refuses to follow it, then, however small the original contravention may seem, another employee will be able to argue that the management are discriminating if they won't allow a different employee to break a policy.
Probably, when the policy was created, the
wearing of religious symbols was considered too hot a potato to try to introduce rules. Attempts to tell people to remove garments of religious significance had already been causing furores ever since the rules on motor cycle crash helmets was challenged by Sikhs. I strongly suspect that this is why the rules appear to be far less strict on what an employee wears about their person.
If I was this chap, I would simply transfer the cross symbol from decorating the vehicle to decorating myself, then there would be no breech of policy. Instead he's trying to make the case appear as if it's a case of discrimination, where Christians are being treated differently from other religions, which isn't true.
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