Groff v. DeJoy: The Supreme Court Changes the Rules for How Employers Must Accommodate Religious Beliefs

In June 2023, the United States Supreme Court released an opinion in Groff v. DeJoy that affects all employers who are faced with accommodating their employees’ religious practices and beliefs.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees and applicants based on their religion. The law requires employers to reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious beliefs and practices, unless doing so would result in an undue hardship to the employer’s business.

“过度的困难”在传统上很容易解决

Since 1977, courts have looked to the Supreme Court’s decision in 环球航空公司. v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63 (1977) to help determine what is an “undue hardship” on an employer. 具体地说, they have focused on one sentence in the decision: “To require [the employer] to bear more than a 微量允许 cost in order to give [the employee] Saturdays off is an undue hardship.”

自 Hardison opinion, courts have accepted its established undue hardship definition and have generally held that an employer can deny an employee’s request for religious accommodation if it imposes anything more than a 微量允许 企业成本. (法院一般将"微量允许小到甚至不值得注意.)毫无疑问, this has resulted in a rather low bar for denying religious accommodation requests in the workplace, and many legal scholars have opined that the interpretation was not one that the Supreme Court intended.

最高法院重新审查过度困难和 微量允许 标准

In Groff, 最高法院借此机会重新审查 微量允许 standard and the concept of undue hardship in the context of religious accommodation. 那个案子涉及一个邮递员, 杰拉尔德·格罗夫(“格罗夫”), who followed Sunday Sabbath – a practice that discourages any work on Sunday. Initially, the USPS placed Groff in positions that did not require him to work on Sundays. But in 2017, the station where Groff worked began making Sunday deliveries. The USPS had other employees perform Groff’s Sunday assignments and began subjecting Groff to disciplinary procedures for his failure to work on those days. 2019年1月，他辞职了.

格罗夫根据第七章起诉美国邮政总局, alleging that the agency could have accommodated his Sunday Sabbath practices “without undue hardship on the conduct of [USPS’s] business.”  Both the trial court and the court of appeals found in favor of the USPS, ruling that, under Hardison, the agency had shown that accommodating Groff’s request was more than a 微量允许 成本是强加给他的同事的, 扰乱了工作场所和工作流程, 员工士气低落.”

最高法院使用了 Groff 案例审核“不当困难”标准. It unanimously held that the lower courts’ interpretations of the Hardison 案例不正确, finding that an employer cannot prove “undue hardship” under Title VII by only showing the burden to be “more than 微量允许.“本院注意到这一点 Hardison referred repeatedly to “substantial” burdens and that such a description was a more appropriate formulation of the standard.

法院驳回了"微量允许” test, instead finding that to show “undue hardship” the employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its business. 在审查雇主的决定时, 法院必须考虑所有相关因素, including the particular accommodations at issue and their practical impact in light of the nature, size, 以及雇主的运营成本.

While the Court refused to make a ruling on the facts in the Groff case, 它在评估可能的住宿时确实说明了这一点, the impact of the accommodation on the employee’s coworkers is only relevant to the extent that it affects the conduct of the business. The Court also cautioned employers not to just assess the reasonableness of a particular accommodation, but to consider whether there might be other potential accommodations that would suffice.

新标准加重雇主负担

Groff changes the analysis employers must make when faced with accommodating an employee’s religious practices. 在这个决定之前, it was relatively easy for employers to deny certain accommodation requests by interpreting every hardship that was more than minimal as undue. Now, employers must show that the alleged resulting hardship will substantially burden their business before they can reject a proposed accommodation.  Future court decisions will no doubt refine the parameters of this new standard, 但在那之前, employers should approach religious accommodation requests with more caution.

Employers are encouraged to seek the counsel of an experienced employment attorney when faced with an employee’s need or request for religious accommodation in the workplace.

杰夫•威尔逊 是一个Pender & Coward shareholder focusing his practice on employment law matters, 包括咨询和商业诉讼.