Since 1977, employers, courts, and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have relied on the language in TWA v. Hardiston, a Supreme Court decision which said that, in accommodating an employee’s religious beliefs under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, an employer did not have “to bear more than a de minimis cost”; to require more would be an undue hardship. But, in 2023, a unanimous Supreme Court said that 46-year-old reading of Hardiston was incorrect, and that for an employer to claim that accommodating an employee’s religion would be an undue hardship, it “must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
Is that the same as the undue hardship test under the Americans With Disabilities Act, which requires “significant difficulty and expense”? No, said the Court, that’s a different statute:
What is most important is that “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…Courts must apply the test to take 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.
Groff v. DeJoy, ___ U.S. ___ (June 29, 2023).
The Groff decision, which involved a postal worker who had been disciplined when he refused to work on Sundays, came down just a few weeks after the EEOC released its 2022 statistics, showing that a wave of nearly 14,000 religious discrimination charges—mostly related to COVID-19 vaccines–propelled the agency’s 2022 caseload to a total of 73,485, the highest since 2019. The EEOC received 73,485 new charges in 2022, up nearly 20% from 2021. The caseload growth spurt of more than 12,000 over 2021 is apparently due largely to the spike in claims by workers asserting religious discrimination arising out of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Religious discrimination/failure to accommodate claims soared from 2,111 in 2021 to 13,814 last year, an increase of more than 550%.
What this means to you:
The new standard set in Groff means that employers must look at the specific facts in each case when handling a request for a religious accommodation. And keep an open mind. As the Court said: “Faced with an accommodation request like Groff’s, it would not be enough for an employer to conclude that forcing other employees to work overtime would constitute an undue hardship. Consideration of other options, such as voluntary shift swapping, would also be necessary.”
Now is not the time to let up on your legal compliance efforts! Make sure that all supervisory level employees have been given comprehensive training on preventing workplace discrimination—including handling reasonable accommodation requests—through our Managing Within the Law training. To book your 2023 and 2024 dates, call us 800-458-2778 or send us an email!
Updated 07-10-2023
Information here is correct at the time it is posted. Case decisions cited here may be reversed. Please do not rely on this information without consulting an attorney first.
