June 29, 2023
If you’ve got a job with a boss – and a strongly held religious belief — the Supreme Court issued a ruling today – that you may want to keep in you back pocket.
And believe it or not – the justices were unanimous on this one.
In today’s ruling the Supreme Court created a new rule when it comes to when an employer can deny your religious accommodation.
Since the late 1970s the law said your employer could deny your religious accommodation of your strongly held religious belief — if the employer was able to prove it would create undue hardship to the company. Most people interpret “undue hardship” to mean more than just a minimal cost. That’s really vague. So now – the new rule is — religious accommodation requests should be granted unless the “employer can show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.” And “that takes into account all relevant factors in the case at hand, including the particular accommodations at issue and their practical impact in light of the nature, “size and operating cost of [an] employer.” Still pretty vague but more employee-friendly.
I first told you about this case – Groff vs DeJoy in this video back in April. Gerald Groff is an evangelical Christian who was a postal service worker. He refused to work on Sundays because of his religious beliefs. USPS tried to make accommodations for him, but in the end those accommodations weren’t good enough and Groff resigned. He then sued saying USPS violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act which makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee based on religion.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote this majority opinion and every Justice signed on saying the previous test established in the 1970s — that said a company only needed to prove “undue hardship” to deny a religious accommodation was flawed from the beginning. But brace yourself – legal experts are expecting a wave of lawsuits from employees testing what exactly this new rule means.
Read the Supreme Court ruling here.
