NPR (“The Supreme Court rules against USPS in Sunday work case“):
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously handed a major victory to religious groups by greatly expanding how far employers must go to accommodate the religious views of their employees.
The court ruled in favor of Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian postal worker, who refused to work on Sundays for religious reasons and said the U.S. Postal Service should accommodate his religious belief. He sued USPS for religious discrimination when he got in trouble for refusing to work Sunday shifts.
The case now returns to the lower courts.
The justices clarified law that made it illegal for employers to discriminate based on religion, requiring that they accommodate the religious beliefs of workers as long as the accommodation does not impose an “undue hardship on the employer’s business.” The court had previously defined the statutory term “undue hardship” by saying that employers should not have to bear more than what the court called a “de minimis,” or trifling, cost.
That “de minimis” language has sparked a lot of criticism over the years. But Congress has repeatedly rejected proposals to provide greater accommodations for religious observers, including those who object to working on the Sabbath.
On Thursday, writing for the court, Justice Samuel Alito said the hardship must be more than minimal.
Courts “should resolve whether a hardship would be substantial in the context of an employer’s business in the commonsense manner that it would use in applying any such test,” he wrote.
Thursday’s decision is yet another example of the court’s increasing inclination to favor religiously observant groups, whether those groups are religious employers or religious employees.
For instance, the court has repeatedly sided with religious schools to be exempt from employment discrimination laws as applied to lay teachers. And in 2014, the conservative court ruled for the first time that a for-profit company could be exempt from a generally applicable federal law. Specifically, it ruled that Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation employing some 13,000 employees, did not have to comply with a federal law that required employer-funded health plans to include coverage for contraceptive devices.
SCOTUSBlog’s Amy Howe (“Justices rule in favor of evangelical Christian postal worker“):
Federal law bars employers from discriminating against workers for practicing their religion unless the employer can show that the worker’s religious practice cannot “reasonably” be accommodated without “undue hardship.” The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a trivial burden is not the kind of “undue hardship” that will justify an employer’s failure to accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs. Instead, the court explained, an employer must accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs unless it can show that doing so would “result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of” the employer’s business.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote for a unanimous court. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion, which was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The ruling was largely a victory for the plaintiff in the case, Gerald Groff. Groff, an evangelical Christian who believes that Sundays should be reserved for rest and worship. Groff began working for the U.S. Postal Service in 2012, but he was disciplined after he refused to come to work on Sundays and he resigned in 2019. Groff had urged the court to overturn Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, a 1977 decision on the meaning of the “undue hardship” provision. Instead, Groff contended, the justices should hold that employers must accommodate their employees’ religious practices unless doing so would require significant difficulty and expense. The justices declined either to reconsider their earlier ruling or adopt that high bar, but they sent Groff’s case back to the lower court for another look under the standard they outlined on Thursday.
In a 21-page opinion, Alito explained that although lower courts since Hardison have interpreted the phrase “undue hardship” to mean “any effort or cost that is ‘more than … de minimis,’” that interpretation is “a mistake.” The court’s decision in Hardison, Alito observed, focused primarily on whether federal employment discrimination laws required the airline and the union to accommodate an employee’s religious practices at the expense of the seniority rights of more senior employees.
The question of when additional costs constitute an “undue hardship” received relatively little attention, Alito stressed. So, although the court’s opinion in Hardison indicated that it would be an “undue hardship” to require the airline to “bear more than a de minimis cost in order to give Hardison Saturdays off” to observe the Sabbath, that language, Alito reasoned, was not necessarily intended as an “authoritative interpretation” of what it means for something to be an “undue hardship.” To the contrary, Alito noted, elsewhere in Hardison the court indicated “three times that an accommodation is not required when it entails ‘substantial’ ‘costs’ or ‘expenditures.’”
A more demanding standard, Alito added, is also more consistent with the text of the phrase “undue hardship.” The term “hardship,” Alito wrote, “is more severe than a mere burden.” And if the hardship is “undue,” Alito continued, it must be “excessive” or “unjustifiable” – which is something “very different from a burden that is merely more than de minimis, i.e., something that is ‘very small or trifling.’”
Alito rejected both Groff’s suggestion that the employer must accommodate the employee’s religious practices unless the employer would incur significant difficulty or expense and the Biden administration’s suggestion, which focused on the “substantial expenditures” or “substantial additional costs” that the employer would incur. Instead, Alito concluded, “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 then sent Groff’s case back to the lower courts for more proceedings. Because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit had relied on the “more than de minimis cost” standard, he wrote, it may have overlooked other possible accommodations, such as “the cost of incentive pay, or the administrative costs of coordination with other nearby stations with a broader set of employees.” The lower courts, he indicated, should apply “the clarified context-specific standard” that the court had outlined on Thursday.
Sotomayor, joined by Jackson, wrote separately to note that although Groff had asked the justices to hold that the employer must show “undue hardship to its business” from accommodating an employee’s religious practices, the court on Thursday had indicated only that the employer must show “undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business” – which, Sotomayor emphasized, could include burdens on the business’s employees. “Indeed,” Sotomayor stressed, “for many businesses, labor is more important to the conduct of the business than any other factor.”
I examined the merits of the case back in January (“Religious Accommodations and Slippery Slopes“) and won’t substantially rehash that here. The nut ‘graph:
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not unreasonable to give a man Sundays off. Why, most of us typically get Sundays off! But Groff is specifically in a job designed to fill in on weekends—of which there are only two days!—and holidays. Giving him half of the days off is, well, problematic. And not just for his managers. Somebody else now has to suck up the Sunday shifts. And there are only three others who can do it, including the Postmaster himself!
Seeing the headlines yesterday afternoon and this morning, I had come away with the impression that the justices had ruled that this level of accommodation was required. Given the trajectory of their recent Free Exercise Clause rulings, I had expected that outcome. Yet, that’s not what happened here. Instead, they punted this back to the lower court with instructions that standard they applied was too weak and that they should consider the tradeoffs in a “commonsense manner.”
That . . . seems right to me. Indeed, in the case of a government institution like the US Postal Service, I think the standard Groff himself was requesting, “undue hardship,” is reasonable. I just think that, given the facts of the case, giving one of three employees hired explicitly to work weekends half the weekend off constituted an undue hardship. I fully expect the lower court to reach the same conclusion.
I haven’t taken the time to closely read the opinions themselves beyond the “Held” section. I find it interesting that the justices unanimously agreed that the de minimus standard was too weak. Indeed, the opinion essentially says that that phrase in Hardison was never meant to be a guiding principle and that, instead, the language in Title VII should be the guide. We’ll see what they do with the case if it comes back up—which, again, I fully expect will happen.
