Religious Liberty Returns to the Supreme Court
Authority of Law outside the United States Supreme Court. Photo by by Matt H. Wade via Wikimedia Commons.
Religious liberty was back at the Supreme Court on Tuesday as the justices heard arguments on the case of a postal worker who felt that working on Sunday violated his religious beliefs. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court after a lower court had ruled against the worker, saying that accommodating him would place an “undue burden” on the Postal Service.
Gerald Groff, the plaintiff in Groff v. DeJoy, began working as a rural carrier for the US Postal Service in 2012. Groff is an evangelical Protestant who believes that Sunday is a holy day of rest. (The facts of the case are online here in the lower court ruling.)
That was fine until 2013 when the USPS contracted with Amazon to begin Sunday deliveries. By 2015, the service had been expanded to Quarryville, Pennsylvania where Groff worked. Groff informed his manager of his inability to work Sundays due to his religious beliefs and was originally allowed to cover other shifts throughout the week in exchange for not being assigned to work Sundays.
That was fine until May 2016 when the USPS signed an agreement with the National Rural Letter Carriers Association that allowed only two reasons for exempting employees from Sunday work. The deal required that employees either request leave or exceed the 40-hour weekly limit by working Sunday. Even then, the Postal Service tried to work with Groff. They moved him to a smaller post office in Holtwood, Pa. that did not do Amazon deliveries.
That was fine until 2017 when Holtwood began to do the Sunday deliveries. Initially, the postmaster there tried to accommodate Groff by allowing him to either take another day off work as a day of worship or come in on Sunday after church. Groff was also allowed to be excused from Sunday work if a replacement carrier could be found.
Problems arose when Groff was scheduled to work on Sunday and simply did not show up. In 2017 and 2018, Groff missed his Sunday work assignments at least 24 times. Groff was administratively punished for his absences and other workers, who had to work more weekends because of Groff’s absenteeism, began to complain and resent his behavior, but he was apparently never singled out for his religion. Ultimately, Groff resigned on January 18, 2019, and filed suit for disparate treatment and failure to accommodate his religious beliefs.
A federal court in Pennsylvania ruled against Groff and dismissed his case. The court found that the USPS did not discriminate against Groff when it disciplined him for refusing to work on Sunday. The lower court also said that a company did not have to completely rectify a conflict to accommodate religious employees, especially when doing so would place an undue hardship on the company. This ruling was upheld by the US Court of Appeals in a 2-1 ruling.
As the district court judge noted in his ruling, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, “a sufficient religious accommodation need not be the ‘most’ reasonable one (in the employee’s view), it need not be the one that the employee suggests or prefers, and it need not be the one that least burdens the employee (Shelton v. Univ. of Med. & Dentistry of NJ).”
Further the judge also noted that the agreement between the Rural Carriers Association and the Postal Service was a collective bargaining agreement and one that did not permit Groff’s schedule to be adjusted to his liking. Scheduling Groff for no Sundays would create a hardship by violating the agreement in addition to many other hardships including short-staffing and morale issues.
At the Supreme Court, the justices seemed sympathetic to Groff. CNN reports that Justice Alito seemed ready to rule for Groff, but Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh seemed concerned about the morale and scheduling problems that would placed on the Postal Service if the company had to agree to Groff’s demands.
I am sure that Groff’s religious beliefs are deeply and sincerely held, but I don’t believe that he has been reasonable. The Postal Service offered several accommodations and Groff refused them. His Sunday absenteeism put him at odds with other workers, many of whom may also have wanted to attend church or spend time with their families on Sundays.
Groff says that he was treated differently because he was a Christian. I think that much is true. He was offered scheduling advantages that other workers did not receive, but that still was not enough for him.
I’m sympathetic to Groff. I’m also Christian and I like to attend church on Sunday. Nevertheless, I realize that in the modern world, many jobs require work on the weekends. If not working weekends was my top priority, I could find another job.
Groff’s situation is a bit different since he originally did not have to work Sundays. His job requirements changed, which is something that many of us experience. Still, his employer did make good faith attempts to work with Groff, who refused to meet the Postal Service halfway.
As friendly as the Court is to religious freedom, I really can’t imagine that they will rule in favor of Groff. The upheaval that would be created by allowing employees to pick their favorite holy day of the weekend not to work would simply be too great.
Would businesses be required to offer all practicing Christians Sundays off? How about Saturday for Jews and Friday for Muslims? Are we to expect private employers to classify and schedule their employees by religion? Could we get a three-day weekend for ecumenical worship?
The Supreme Court’s current term ends in June and we should have a decision on the case by then. If I was Gerald Groff, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
USPS is not a company. It is an independent government service agency :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#:~:text=The%20USPS%20is%20often%20mistaken,United%20States%22%2C%20(39%20U.S.C.Report
“USPS is not a company. It is an independent government service agency.”
…and?Report
he keeps mislabeling it as a company in his thread. Which is a huge problem in that labor laws for USPS are not “corporate” labor laws. I mean the USPS has a Congressionally imposed forward funding of its pensions requirement that’s slowly but surely bankrupting it.Report
“the USPS is not subject to American laws” is a unique point of view.Report
The USPS is subject to DIFFERENT labor laws then a private company. Just like my agency. Just like Congressional staff for that matter.Report
“But it would be hard” has, historically, not been considered an acceptable defense for employers failing to comply with law and regulation. And it’s not Groff’s fault that the organization failed to adequately staff its facility and expected employees to just work harder indefinitely.
“Would businesses be required to offer all practicing Christians Sundays off? How about Saturday for Jews and Friday for Muslims? ”
Oh look, a racist anti-semite wrote this post!Report
This just misses the point, which is what the law or regulation in question requires. Title VII, the law involved in Groff has long been interpreted to mean that employers — who, in the absence of Title VII, would have no obligation to accommodate the religious habits of employees at all — need to bear no more than minimal burdens to accommodate them. The Supremes said as much decades ago, and Groff wants them to revisit the question and reverse themselves, even though Congress, if it had disagreed, could have revised Title VII decades ago and didn’t.
This case is, incidentally, a poor vehicle for that purpose. The employer made more than de minimis efforts, so we might well see an opinion giving Groff no meaningful relief while simply changing the jargon used by lower courts.Report
*shrug* if you want to defend capitalism, go ahead!
“The employer made more than de minimis efforts…”
…implying that the employee could expect such efforts to continue, I’d figure.Report
Well, I am a capitalist. Surely this isn’t news to you.
But whether I like capitalism or not, the law is what it is, and, on the issue of how hard employers have to work to accommodate an employee’s religious habits, which, I repeat, it would be under no obligation to do at all but for Title VII, it favors employers over employees. Specifically, under Title VII as the Supremes interpreted it in 1977, employers are not required to make more than de minimis efforts, a standard the employer exceeded here. If Congress thought this was wrong, it had 26 years to fix the problem. If this doesn’t suit you, take it up with the Supremes and Congress.
What was your point again?Report
Pretty sure that’s what is happening here.Report
In the real world, yes, but not in DD’s.Report
The Texas Senate recently passed a bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools. That’s a bad idea, but would at least have the positive effect of creating a public reminder that the fourth commandment, routinely broken by almost all Christians, says to observe the biblical Sabbath, that is, Saturday.Report
As the reader considers this case, it may also be helpful to recall that there is precedent, dating back to 1977, addressing the degreetowhi h a business must accommodate individual employees’ religious beliefs. Groff is almost exactly on point with Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, a case which dealt with a Seventh-Day Adventist (or similar) requesting Saturdays off his job as an aircraft mechanic. Hardison effectively set the bar for “undue burden” on the employer at de minimis. This creates a legal regime in which the federal statutory right against religious discrimination looks very weak on paper. (If you ignore another law called RFRA.)
In practice, as the OP points out,it can be somewhat different. It appears to me that Groff has already been given treatment which well exceeds what the law requires. I rather suspect it’s because the people responding to his requests are sympathetic to him if not co-religionists who just weren’t pushing their own rights as far as Groff.
Color this also with a lot of recent experience involving workers claiming religious exemptions to COVID vaccination mandates, and substantial sympathy for that position signaled in various ways from at least Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Were Barrett to join them, it’d be their shot to call, not the Chief’s.
I would watch for a quiet modification to the de minimis standard of Hardison, one quiet enough that the majority opinion will call it a “clarification” or something similar. I think the majority will make the Title VII right to religious accommodation more robust. Likely not robust enough to help Mr. Groff, though.
Key votes: Gorsuch and Barrett.Report
Sounds about right. I expect a Gorsuch opinion, possibly a concurrence, bloviating about terminology while not making a substantive difference.Report
If I were a conspiratorially minded person I might suspect that this was a ratfvcking operation by liberals to find a wedge issue between the plutocrat and religious conservative wings of the GOP.
But that might give Dark Brandon too much credit.
But I do see a wedge forming, exemplified by the “Woke Corporations” battlecry.
As the social conservatives shrink into a minority they are being further and further estranged by corporate America.
Unlike the other religious minorities, Christians are unwilling to accept their minority status and demand to be treated as the norm-setting majority.Report
For some very very loose definition of “Christian”. Evangelicals like to pretend they speak for all Christians but they really don’t.Report
Exactly this. Many of us who took the yoke and mantle are perfectly willing to sit at a board inclusive table where much is asked of us.Report
People who self-identify as Christian still constitute >70% of the country. Some of these good people are quite willing to accept that the other 30% get a seat at the table of governance too. Others not so much.
And yeah, this is definitely not Dark Brandon playing fifth-dimensional chess. Groff’s attorneys are from the First Liberty Institute, the Independence Law Center, and the Church State Council. You can look them up yourself, or you can take my word for it that these entities all self-identify as conservative Christian organizations.
And at the risk of being thought a snarky liberal, I’m pretty clear that when someone or something identifies as “conservative Christian,” the first of those two adjectives is of eclipsingly greater importance.Report
I’m surprised he can’t be moved to an office which has enough people that staffing around this isn’t an issue.
Another solution is he could work part time. One of my sister in laws does 25 hours a week at the post office.Report
I think this may lead to the government establishing sunday as the legal day of worship in the guise of standardization for all business. They are fighting for a good cause on the wrong day.Report
I don’t think that would fly before even the current watered-down can of Establishment Clause Lite that’s on tap at today’s SCOTUS. But if I were going to bring a challenge to that, I’d do it on behalf of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister rather than an Orthodox rabbi, and I’d include a Free Exercise Clause claim along with the Establishment Clause.Report