Christian mailman who refused to work Sundays scores Supreme Court win
A Christian postal worker who quit after he was given grief for refusing to work Sundays had his discrimination lawsuit reinstated by the US Supreme Court Thursday.
Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian from Pennsylvania, sued the USPS in 2019, claiming that he was forced to leave his job after he received warnings and suspensions for refusing to work Sundays so he could observe the Sabbath.
Groff, 45, alleged the agency discriminated against him by failing to approve his religious accommodation to not be scheduled on Sundays.
The high court unanimously reinstated Groff’s case — which was thrown out by a lower court — finding that workplaces must give accommodations to religious workers unless the modifications cause “substantial increased costs” to the business.
The Supreme Court said that companies could no longer shirk religious accommodations on a reading of case law that they only prove minimal — “de minimis,” in legal parlance — negative effects to business.
Groff’s case will be sent back to a federal appeals court, which will rule on the merit of his suit based on the Supreme Court’s clarification of the case law.
Groff began working for the Quarryville, Pa. Post Office in 2012 as a mailman and didn’t have any issues avoiding work on Sundays until 2017, when the USPS starting delivering packages for Amazon, according to his federal lawsuit.
Initially, Groff sought and received a transfer to the smaller post office in Holtwood, Pa., which had just seven employees and did not make Sunday deliveries of any kind. However, the Holtwood office began to process Amazon deliveries in March 2017 as well.
A co-worker took Groff’s scheduled Sunday shifts until she was injured in December 2017, at which point Groff formally requested a religious accommodation, according to his lawsuit.
But the agency never gave him a formal response and kept scheduling him to work on the holy day.
Groff first received a written warning on June 6, 2017, then received a one-week suspension on Jan. 16, 2018 and a two-week suspension on Oct. 9, 2018, his suit said.
“The discipline and threat of termination due to the Lord’s Day observance caused Groff much anxiety and stress,” claimed his suit — which sought unspecified damages. Ultimately, Groff quit in 2019.
Officials said Groff’s absences created a tense environment and contributed to morale problems. It also meant other carriers had to deliver more Sunday mail than they otherwise would.
Groff said he was grateful for the ruling, adding: “I hope this decision allows others to be able to maintain their convictions without living in fear of losing their jobs because of what they believe.”
“The Supreme Court’s decision today means employers will have to take seriously their obligation to adjust workplace rules and policies, including schedules, so that workers with faith commitments are not excluded from the workplace,” Groff’s lawyer Alan Reinach said in a statement. “It is a huge victory for equal employment opportunity for those of every faith.”
In a statement, the US Postal Service said: “We believe the lower court will conclude that providing the requested accommodation here would impose a substantial burden on the Postal Service. We are confident that the Postal Service will again prevail when the case is remanded.”
The case is the latest religious confrontation the high court has been asked to referee. Last year, the court split 6-3 along ideological lines in ruling for a Washington state public high school football coach who wanted to pray on the field after games.
Other religious cases have drawn wide agreement among the justices, such as upholding a cross-shaped monument on public grounds and ruling that Boston had violated the free speech rights of a conservative activist when it refused his request to fly a Christian flag on a City Hall flagpole.
In the latest case, a federal law — Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would be an “undue hardship” for the business. But a 1977 Supreme Court case, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, says in part that employers can deny religious accommodations to employees when they impose “more than a de minimis cost” on the business.
During arguments in the case in April the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the Post Office, told the justices that the Hardison case as a whole actually requires an employer who wants to deny an accommodation to show more.
But Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that while some lower courts have understood Hardison the way the Biden administration suggested, other courts incorrectly latched on to the “de minimis” language “as the governing standard.”
“In this case, both parties agree that the ‘de minimis’ test is not right, but they differ slightly in the alternative language they prefer. … We think it is enough to say that an employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business,” Alito wrote.
The Biden administration has said that requests for religious accommodation come up most often when employees seek schedule changes like the Sabbath off or midday prayer breaks or exemptions from a company’s dress code or grooming policies. They also come up when an employee wants to display a religious symbol in the workplace.
With Post wires
