What cooperations can do is reprimand, write up, lay off for days, or terminate a person not following their rules.
Within reason, true. If someone refuses to say, wear a beard and hair net when they serve food, they can technically be fired for that. Usually it never gets to that point though since most people are reasonable enough to correct things they are doing at work. Usually when people are fired for reasons like this, it's an excuse to get rid of a worker with problem behaviors or by bosses who power trip and are just bad. The latter is unfortunate, but it does happen from time to time
What corporations cannot do is discriminate. Like I said before, a company can
suggest that an employee say happy holidays instead of Merry Christmas but they cannot actually do anything about it without facing lawsuits. Usually that's big enough of a deterrent for companies to leave people alone who just want to wish people a Merry christmas, so there's nothing really happening here
Cooperations do not want to have lawsuits on their discrimination hands from no one and in these days people may sue you for sneezing. A company can fire you for any reason these days.
But why would anyone look for a reason to fire someone for simply saying Merry christmas? That makes zero sense to me - especially if someone is already trained and actively working as an employee. Working short staffed while trying to find a replacement worker who ISN'T Christian (with the risk of then saying Merry Christmas) with a population of 63% in the nation just because they want to discriminate seems very unlikely to me
If this is actually happening in real life though, you'll need more than "they CAN do this." Anyone can do anything. The question is; is this ACTUALLY happening in any meaningful way right now on a meaningful level? If so, I'd like to see some specific cases. Like - is McDonald's or some other major corporation doing this or is it a small business with like 10 employees? What's the detail behind the case?
Now for your articles you posted
The first one lists a lot of assumptions and doesn't include any actual information about anyone being fired for saying Merry Christmas. It's an opinion piece
The second article actually has some really interesting information in it, so thank you for posting that one. Ultimately though, she closes with this;
"But, I digress. So, what did we learn legally? Phrases like “Happy Chanukah” or “Merry Christmas” are probably not required tenants of anyone’s religious beliefs that are included in every conversation. As such, your company can probably restrict your use of religious greetings, but probably cannot force you to give them up altogether."
This is in reference to if things ever reach a legal level in the courts of law. It hardly ever gets to this point, but when it does there's some interesting legal parsing that happens
And for the third article, it seems to me like the lady just had a bad attitude and was fired for that. That's the problem with these cases. They only tell half of the story, and when it comes to employees their whole work history comes into play. It's never as simple as being fired for one specific reason usually, and if it can be distilled to discrimination, that evidence needs to be concrete or it's just assumptions imo
Discrimination does happen though, make no mistake, but is it happening on a meaningful level for this specific instance? Not that I can see. Is there potential for it? Sure, but there's potential for serial killers to live next door to me. That doesn't mean it's a fact of reality, though
