Editor’s Note: This article written by Beth P. Zoller and Carole Lynn Nowicki appears in the October 2023 edition of the NJSBA Labor and Employment Law Quarterly. Section members can read the full issue here.
In Groff v. DeJoy, the United States Supreme Court recently revisited the proper standard for employee requests for religious accommodations under Title VII. In doing so, the Court established a new legal standard that employers must satisfy before denying accommodation requests based on an “undue hardship” to the employer.
Gerald Groff challenged his employer, the United States Postal Service, for their denial of his request for a religious accommodation in the form of an exemption from Sunday shifts. The District Court and the Third Circuit ruled in favor of USPS. Relying on TWA v. Hardison, the lower courts determined that USPS demonstrated that Groff’s requested exemption from Sunday shifts amounted to an undue hardship because it “imposed on his coworkers, disrupted the workplace and workflow, and diminished employee morale.” Thus, the lower courts held that USPS met the burden of establishing that the requested accommodation would impose more than a “de minimis cost” on the employer.
On appeal, the Supreme Court considered whether it should confirm the “de minimis test” for undue hardship under Title VII as stated in Hardison or use a new test. The Court also evaluated whether an employer can establish “undue hardship” under Title VII by merely showing that the requested accommodation burdened the employee’s coworkers rather than the business itself.
In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court created a new standard by which to review requests for religious accommodations. Specifically, the Court held that an “undue hardship” exists when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business, noting that this is a fact-specific inquiry. The Court defined a “hardship” as, at a minimum, “something hard to bear” and more severe than a “mere burden.”
Thus, an employer cannot avoid Title VII liability simply by showing that an accommodation would impose some sort of additional costs. The modifier “undue” means that the requisite burden, privation, or adversity must rise to an “excessive” or “unjustifiable” level. Interpreting “undue hardship” in this way is “something very different from a burden that is merely more than ‘de minimis’” (i.e., something that is very small or trifling, as defined in Black’s Law Dictionary) and closer to the references in TWA v. Hardison to “substantial additional costs” or “substantial expenditures.”
As such, the Supreme Court stated that an employer must show that the burden of “granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.” In doing so, “courts must apply the test in a manner 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.’” Ultimately, “‘undue hardship’ in Title VII means what it says, and courts should resolve whether a hardship would be substantial in the context of an employer’s business in the commonsense manner that it would use in applying any such test.”
Regarding whether an impact on coworkers could amount to an undue hardship, the Supreme Court specifically stated that a coworker’s dislike of a religious practice or expression in the workplace or the fact that an accommodation may be provided does not “factor into the undue hardship inquiry.” Because Title VII requires an assessment of a possible accommodation’s effect on the conduct of the employer’s business, the impact of a particular accommodation on coworkers is only relevant to the extent that the impact on coworkers affects the conduct of the business.
The Court also stated that “Title VII requires that an employer reasonably accommodate an employee’s practice of religion, not merely that it assess the reasonableness of a particular possible accommodation or accommodations.” Consequently, an employer cannot merely state that a particular accommodation poses an undue hardship and deny it, but the employer must consider other options (such as voluntary shift-swapping) that might resolve the conflict between the employees’ religious practice and the work requirement.
As a result, the Supreme Court vacated the judgment and remanded the matter to the lower court to apply the “clarified context-specific standard” (assuming that the Third Circuit’s application of the Hardison’s “‘more than a de minimis cost’ test may have led the court to dismiss a number of possible accommodations, including those involving the cost of incentive pay, or the administrative costs of cooperation with other nearby stations with a broader set of employees”).
Takeaways
This decision established an entirely new legal standard upon which employers must evaluate religious accommodation requests. Therefore, before determining that a request presents an undue hardship, an employer must be able to demonstrate that the costs to its business in granting a religious accommodation request would be excessive or unjustifiable under the circumstances. An employer cannot deny a religious accommodation request under the guise of undue hardship unless the employer faces “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.” An employer may only rely on the defense that a requested accommodation creates an undue burden on coworkers if it can establish that accommodating the request would not only impact other employees, but that the impact on employees or other consequence of the accommodation would also substantially affect the conduct of the business itself. Employers must also consider other options that would accommodate the employee’s religious practice without causing an undue hardship.