Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday is hearing arguments over the plight of a Christian former postal worker who alleges the agency violated a federal civil rights law when it failed to accommodate his religious beliefs.
The legal dispute is the latest to come before the justices involving religious groups and individuals who are seeking relief from the conservative court. A decision from the Supreme Court in favor of the former U.S. Postal Service employee, Gerald Groff, would be the latest in a string of rulings expanding religious rights.
Already this term, the court heard arguments in a case involving a Christian graphic designer who does not want to create websites for same-sex weddings, and last year, it sided with a former high school football coach punished for praying on the field after games. In June, the Supreme Court said that schools that provide religious instruction cannot be excluded from a tuition assistance program offered by the state of Maine, and in 2021 it ruled in favor of a Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia that refused to work with same-sex couples looking to serve as foster parents.
Known as Groff v. DeJoy, the case involves Groff, an Evangelical Christian who began his career at the Postal Service in 2012 as a Rural Carrier Associate, which are noncareer employees who provide coverage for absent regular carriers and are scheduled on an as-needed basis, according to court filings.
Groff observes the Sabbath on Sundays, and his religious beliefs prevent him from working on those days. While this did not pose an issue in his first years working for the Postal Service, that changed after the agency signed an agreement with Amazon in 2013 for Sunday package deliveries in an attempt to remain profitable.
The post office where Groff worked in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, began Amazon Sunday delivery service in 2015, and he was exempted from working Sundays. But in 2016, the Postal Service and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association entered into a “memorandum of understanding” governing Sunday and holiday schedules, and Groff was informed he’d have to begin working Sunday shifts.
To avoid working on the Sabbath, Groff transferred to a smaller station in Holtwood, Pennsylvania, though that facility began Sunday deliveries in 2017.
According to court filings, the postmaster of the Holtwood Post Office refused to exempt Groff from Sunday delivery, but offered to seek volunteers to cover his shifts when he was scheduled to work. Still, Groff ultimately missed 24 shifts when a replacement carrier couldn’t be secured to accommodate his absence.
The Postal Service took disciplinary action against Groff in response to his missed shifts, including imposing paper suspensions, and he ultimately resigned from his role in January 2019.
Groff filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, alleging it violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits an employer from discriminating against a worker because of their religion. Under the law, an employer must reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious observance unless it would impose an “undue hardship” on the employer.
A federal district court sided with the Postal Service, and a divided panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit affirmed.
In its ruling, the majority found that “[e]xempting Groff from working on Sundays caused more than a de minimis cost on USPS because it actually imposed on his coworkers, disrupted the workplace and workflow, and diminished employee morale at both the Holtwood Post Office and the Lancaster Annex hub.”
The 3rd Circuit was relying on a Supreme Court decision from 1977, in which the court said an employer can assert undue hardship to justify denial of a religious accommodation if it would impose “more than a de minimis cost,” or more than a minimal cost, on the business. Three of the court’s current members, Justice Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, have suggested the court revisit that standard set in the case Trans World Airlines v. Hardison.
Groff, too, is asking the Supreme Court to toss out the test laid out in the 1977 decision for refusing religious accommodations under Title VII, arguing in a filing that it has “evolved into a per se rule that virtually any cost to an employer counts as undue hardship.”
“As a result, Hardison has eviscerated Title VII’s protection of religious employees and thereby eroded the Nation’s commitment to religious freedom and pluralism. Hardison should be jettisoned in favor of a test that matches Title VII’s text,” his lawyers argue.
The law’s “undue hardship” provision, they said, must mean “significant difficulty or expense” in light of an employer’s financial resources, number of employees, and nature of its operations and facilities.
But the Justice Department, which is representing the Postal Service, argued that granting Groff’s requested accommodation would have imposed an undue hardship on the agency. The requested accommodation, the Justice Department argued, required the Postal Service to violate the memorandum of understanding with the rural carrier associates’ union, “operate with insufficient staff and burden workers – burdens that actually contributed to other employees quitting or transferring.”
“Those significant burdens on the conduct of USPS’s business qualify as an undue hardship under any standard,” Justice Department lawyers said.
They cited the Holtwood Postmaster, who said Groff’s absences “created a ‘tense atmosphere’ among the other RCAs” and led to “resentment” toward management.” One carrier transferred because “he felt it was unfair that Groff was not reporting on scheduled Sundays,” the Holtwood Postmaster testified.
“In other words, the record shows that the proposed accommodation of allowing [Groff’s] continued absences would lead to shorthanded staff, challenges completing critical deliveries, and difficulty retaining employees,” the Justice Department said. “Those consequences constitute significant burdens on the conduct of USPS’s business.”
The Biden administration has urged the justices to leave the 1977 decision untouched and instead offer further clarity on its decades-old ruling.
The dispute has brought a slew of friend-of-the-court briefs, many from religious groups — the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints among them — siding with Groff.
“Coworkers may grumble when an employee gets time off on Saturday to observe her Sabbath,” lawyers for the Mormon church, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Anti-Defamation League wrote in a brief. “But denying a religious accommodation because of popular opposition is a dangerous principle that subverts the very purpose of a civil rights statute. The meaning of individual rights would shrivel if they depended on a show of hands.”
But labor unions warned that a demand for a “special, religious preference to avoid weekend work” is a “claim of preferential entitlement based on a religious test.”
“Other workers who simply want and have earned time to spend with their families or to have a day of rest on Sundays are not ‘hecklers’ intolerant of their co-worker’s religion. They are citizens equally entitled to a day of rest, and equally protected against Government-mandated sacrifice to facilitate others’ religious exercise,” the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO, which has roughly 200,000 members nationwide, told the court in a friend-of-the-court brief.
A decision from the court is expected by the end of June.
