Supreme Court ruling on mailman Gerald Groff’s Sunday shift a win for religious workers: experts
A Supreme Court decision in favor of a Christian postal worker who refused to work Sundays will now make it easier for other employees to get religious accommodations at work, experts say.
The high court Thursday reinstated the discrimination lawsuit brought by Gerald Groff — an evangelical Christian — against the United States Postal Service in which he claimed he was forced to quit the agency because they wouldn’t allow him to have Sundays off to observe Sabbath.
The justices unanimously found that employers must now grant religious accommodation requests unless they can prove it’s a significant imposition to the business — whereas before companies only had to show a minimal impact.
“It’s a big deal for those employees who have religious beliefs that are sort of in the minority,” New York Law School professor Arthur Leonard told The Post Thursday.
Leonard said it’s helpful for anyone religious “who wants something a little more than just the employer saying ‘I don’t discriminate based on religion,’ who want their employer to take that extra step to accommodate them.”
Leonard said that the Supreme Court’s clarification on how to interpret the law “gives a little muscle to the requirement to accommodate.”
These types of requests will now have to be taken on a case-by-case basis where the size of a company and the amount of employees will have to be considered if a company tries to argue the accommodation request poses a significant expense, Leonard explained.
New York appellate lawyer Michael Altman agreed that with the new ruling employers no longer have an easy out for making these types of concessions for workers.
“It’s certainly likely that many more people who need a religious accommodation will be getting one,” Altman said.
New York University Law Professor Samuel Estreicher said the decision won’t just only apply to people who don’t want to work on Sabbath but will cover requests for religious accommodation from people of any faith.
“It puts the employers in the position where they have to accommodate not just Sabbath observers but also other kinds of issues that come up,” Estreicher told The Post. “It puts them in a position of having a higher burden of showing that the accommodation is an undue hardship.”
