Religious Accommodation Test Before the Supreme Court
This case law update was written by James P. Garay Heelan, an attorney at the law firm of Shaw Bransford & Roth, where he has practiced federal personnel and employment law since 2012. Mr. Heelan represents federal personnel across the Executive Branch, including career senior executives, law enforcement officers, foreign service officers, intelligence officers, and agencies in matters of federal personnel and employment law.
The Supreme Court is set to decide the legal threshold for federal agencies and other employers to accommodate their employees’ sincerely held religious beliefs and practices.
Gerald Groff is a devout Christian who believes his faith requires him to abstain from working Sundays. In 2012, Groff began his career with the U.S. Postal Service as a Rural Carrier Associate, a non-career position that provides coverage for absent career employees. In his position at the Quarryville, Pennsylvania Post Office, his supervisor helped him avoid working Sundays shifts.
Things changed in 2013, when USPS signed a contract with Amazon to deliver packages all days of the week. Two years later in 2015, Quarryville began delivering Amazon packages on Sundays. Groff’s supervisor exempted him from Sunday work so long as he covered other shifts throughout the week. Then, a 2016 memorandum of understanding between USPS and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association went into effect, establishing a process for scheduling employees for Sunday and holiday Amazon delivery which prioritized volunteers for those shifts before USPS scheduled, as needed, non-volunteers.
After the MOU went into effect, the Quarryville Postmaster informed Groff that he would have to deliver packages on Sundays when he was scheduled, or find another job. To avoid a conflict between work and his faith, Groff transferred to the Holtwood, Pennsylvania Post Office, which had not yet implemented Amazon Sunday deliveries. That short-term solution ended in 2017, when Holtwood began delivering on Sundays.
The Holtwood Postmaster was unable to consistently accommodate Groff with ad hoc requests for volunteers to fill Groff’s assigned Sunday shifts. When a volunteer replacement could not be found, Groff received progressive discipline for not reporting to work his assigned Sunday shifts. After two years at Holtwood, Groff resigned and sued USPS under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for failing to reasonably accommodate his religious practice.
Religion is among Title VII’s protected categories and is defined in the statute to mean “all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief, unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate to an employee’s or prospective employee’s religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.”
In 1977, the Supreme Court decided the case of Trans World Airlines v. Hardison in which the Court ruled against a TWA employee who sought religious accommodation to avoid working on his religiously-observed Sabbath. The Court reasoned in Hardison that the employee’s religious accommodation request did not trump the collective bargaining agreement that governed the plaintiff’s work schedule. And, the Court held requiring the employer to “bear more than a de minimus cost” to never schedule the plaintiff for work on his Sabbath would be an undue hardship for Title VII purposes, meaning that the employer could lawfully deny the plaintiff’s requested accommodation.
Groff’s case presents a direct challenge to Hardison, and his arguments have been rejected by both the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and a 2-1 majority of judicial panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
In August 2022, Groff petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case. His petition immediately drew both support and opposition in the form of amici curiae briefs filed by groups across the country. Among the groups filing briefs were 22 states, Members of Congress, religious groups, labor unions, and a former EEOC General Counsel.
On April 18, 2023, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Groff’s petition. The Court will now deliberate amongst themselves and decide the case. FEDmanager will report on the Court’s decision when it issues.
You can review the full Supreme Court docket in Groff v. DeJoy here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/22-174.html.
For over thirty years, Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C. has provided superior representation on a wide range of federal employment law issues, from representing federal employees nationwide in administrative investigations, disciplinary and performance actions, and Bivens lawsuits, to handling security clearance adjudications and employment discrimination cases.