Reasonable Religious Accommodations: Revisiting Groff v. Dejoy

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Groff v. DeJoy. In Groff, the Court addressed the “undue hardship” standard, which is used to evaluate reasonable religious accommodation requirements for employers under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

In 1977, the Supreme Court established the reasonable religious accommodation test in Trans World Airline, Inc v. Hardison. The Court in Hardison set forth the de minimis cost standard, which they construed to mean that requiring an employer to ‘bear more than a de minimis cost’ to provide religious accommodation is an undue hardship.

An employee seeking to prove religious discrimination must show that their sincerely held religious belief conflicts with a job requirement, that they informed their employer of the conflict, and that the employer disciplined them for not complying with the conflicting requirement.

According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), religion extends not only to traditional organized religions but also to “religious beliefs that are new, uncommon, not part of a formal church or sect, only subscribed to by a small number of people, and that seem illogical or unreasonable to others.” A religious belief for purposes of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 includes any belief that is religious in a person’s “own scheme of things,” is “sincere and meaningful,” and “occupies a place in the life of its possessor or parallel to that filled by…God.” (See March 2023 Blog Post, here).

Once the religious belief is identified and the employer notified, the burden shifts to the employer to show they either reasonably attempted to accommodate the religious belief or that the accommodation would impose undue hardship on the employer. An undue hardship occurs when an accommodation request requires an employer to bear more than a de minimis, or minimal, cost.

Groff v. DeJoy presented the Court’s first opportunity to explain the contours of Hardison in nearly 50 years.

Groff, an Evangelical Christian previously employed by the United States Postal Service (USPS), initially did not have to work on Sundays in his role as a Rural Carrier Associate. This arrangement changed in 2013 when USPS partnered with Amazon to provide Sunday deliveries. Following this agreement. Groff was informed he would need to work on Sundays. He requested and was granted a transfer to a smaller rural USPS station that did not offer Sunday deliveries at that time. However, in 2017, Amazon’s Sunday deliveries were introduced at this station as well. Groff refused to work on Sundays, and his station made alternative arrangements to ensure Sunday deliveries were still handled by other staff members. Despite these accommodations, Groff faced ongoing disciplinary actions for his refusal to work on Sundays. He resigned in January 2019 and subsequently filed a lawsuit a few months later under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that USPS could have accommodated his Sunday Sabbath observance without causing undue hardship to its operations.

The Supreme Court held that showing “more than a de minimis cost,” as the phrase used in common parlance, does not suffice to establish “undue hardship” under Title VII.

To determine what an employer must prove to defend a denial of a religious accommodation under Title VII, the Court first looked at the text of Title VII. The statutory term “hardship” refers to, at a minimum, “something hard to bear” and suggests something more than a mere burden.  The Court distinguished “hardship” from “undue hardship.” The addition of the modifier “undue” means that the requisite burden of adversity must rise to a level that is “excessive” or “unjustifiable.”

SCOTUS concluded that “undue hardship” means something very different from a burden that is merely more than de minimis, i.e., “very small or trifling.”

The decision in Groff will make it more difficult for employers to deny religious accommodation requests. Now an employer seeking to deny an employee’s religious accommodation request is required to show that the “burden in granted an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of the particular business.”

This blog revisits a blog post about Religious Accommodation Requirements for Employers published by The Law Group of Northwest Arkansas on March 22, 2023.