Supreme Court considers employer’s duty on religious rites

How far must an employer go to accommodate an employee’s religious practices under federal law? Is it enough for the employer to show that accommodating the employee will result in anything more than minimal cost or operational disruption? Must an employer demonstrate, instead, that accommodating the employee will cause significant difficulty or expense?

These questions were the focus of nearly two hours of oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court last month in a case former postal carrier Gerald Groff brought against Louis DeJoy as U.S. Postmaster General. Groff, an evangelical Christian, resigned when the postmaster at the rural Pennsylvania post office where he worked refused to excuse him from delivering packages for Amazon.com on Sundays, his Sabbath day. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit upheld summary dismissal of Groff ’s claim because accommodating his unwillingness to work Sundays would have imposed much more than a minimal burden on his employer and co-workers.

The law of religious accommodation in the workplace

Title VII, the federal workplace anti-discrimination law, requires an employer “to reasonably accommodate the religious practices of an employee or prospective employee, unless the employer demonstrates that accommodation would result in undue hardship.” Title VII does not define “undue hardship.”

In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an employer need not accommodate an employee’s religious practice if the employer demonstrates that doing so would impose more than a de minimis, meaning trivial, cost on the employer or co-workers.

California’s Fair Employment & Housing Act, by contrast, explicitly