Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to make reasonable accommodations for religious reasons so long as it doesn’t cause undue hardship on the employer. As Max S has pointed out, when it comes to religious accommodations the definition of undue hardship is anything beyond a de minimus expense constitutes an undue hardship. When most of us think of workplace accommodations we think of disabilities. The burden for an employer to accommodate a religious accommodation is actually much less than it is to accommodate a disability.
It may not be an easy win for the plaintiff. If the USPS shows that they made a good faith effort to ensure their staffing needs on Sundays were met without requiring the plaintiff to work they have a pretty good case.
I’m slightly surprised that there aren’t already accepted principles that cover this - what do Jewish people do in these sort of circumstances? Jewish practise is generally a lot stricter than Christian when it comes to not working one day of the week.
I’m also pretty surprised this Post Office is doing anything very much on a Sunday - I’ve certainly never had a Sunday delivery of anything.
Also, the increasing practise of more and more jobs erasing the distinctions between weekdays and weekend days, and treating all days as alike, is quite bad for ordinary working people. It’s good to be pushing back against this. Frankly I think every working person should have as a right the right to blank out one day a week that they never work (whichever day that might happen to be) and this would be a very positive move for general mental health
The post office’s sorting and distribution centers are all about as busy on Sunday as on any other day; the mail moves from point to point even though they’re not doing much last-mile delivery (Amazon packages excepted).
For example, priority mail sent from the Miami area is supposed to be delivered in Chicago in two days. If all goes according to schedule, the first night, it is collected from the origin post office or collection box to a regional center there, postmarked, and sent on the network center for transit to the airport; the next day it should be in Illinois and being sorted for delivery to a regional center and then that night to the local post office for delivery the following day. It doesn’t much matter to the post office whether you mailed it Monday for Wednesday delivery or mailed it Saturday for Monday delivery; the regional and network centers will be keeping the same schedule.
I get packages through USPS on Sunday all the time and it’s been going on a few years - it might only be packages from Amazon. But even if they didn’t deliver anything on Sundays and therefore carriers and clerks didn’t work Sunday , that doesn’t mean that nobody works on Sunday - mail still moves on the weekends
The disappearance of the formally recognized weekend can be directly attributed, in part, to the disappearance of unions from the American labor scene. I mean, why do you think the concept even exists in the first place?
But frankly, that’s a whole other ball of wax than Mr. Groff’s lawsuit is talking about.
I’m not sure if you’re sarcastic. A great many people in the United States are non-Christian. Lancaster, Pennsylvania is not some 90-100% Christian region either.
You think it would be a good idea to let some teacher, for example, declare that they will not work on Mondays and some other teachers in the same school to declare Tuesdays, Wednesdays, … to be free for them. I can see chaos ensuing.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t understand the push back against this guy in this thread. They aren’t making people work seven days a week, right? Then that means someone is going to be off on Sunday. Why can’t that be Groff? It seems like a very minimal accommodation. And even if 90% of his coworkers are Christians, the vast majority of Christians have no qualms about working on Sunday, so that’s no excuse.
I wouldn’t care so much if it were a private employer (though I’d still think they’re wrong not to accommodate if at all possible) but the government really isn’t supposed to be picking which religious beliefs are acceptable for their employees to follow. Seems like there should be an extra layer of scrutiny there.
The push back is this is all based on what he’s claimed and the other side of the story hasn’t been told.
He’s claimed he’s requested holiday, Saturday, and evening hours other people don’t want to work. Well and good.
But do those exist?
And what offer did the USPS make to accommodate him?
Did they make an accommodating offer he rejected? If so, what was it, and why did he reject it?
As for USPS picking and choosing religions - they aren’t. They have a 7 day work week. We don’t know what accommodations they have offered. We only have one person’s claim that an acceptable arrangement was not made. Would a reasonable third party judge the situation unacceptable? Who knows?
And because we are only hearing one side, we don’t know why they won’t accommodate him , or even that they didn’t offer him an accommodation that he rejected.
I’m looking at his complaint,amended complaint and USPS’s answer to the amended complaint. ( will try to provide a link later). He was hired in 2012. Sunday delivery started March 2017. From March 2017 until Dec 2017, a coworker took the Sunday shifts assigned to Groff. In December , she was injured and could no longer do so.
Groff continued to be scheduled for Sundays and received suspensions on 1/16/18 and 10/9/18. It appears that up until Jan 2019, Groff was scheduled to work on at least some Sundays. There was no disciplinary action between 10/18 and when resigned in January 2019, which he claims was a constructive discharge. Groff filed a complaint with the EEO which dismissed his claims.
The USPS answer says that they attempted to accommodate him - he was free to trade or give away Sunday shifts and his supervisors would find coverage when possible.
Reading between the lines , it appears that the only accommodation Groff would have found acceptable was to ensure that he was not scheduled to work on Sundays. ( He apparently either wasn’t scheduled or found coverage for the time period between suspensions and between the second suspension and his resignation) My guess is that the collective bargaining agreement with the union precluded this as they often do - perhaps employees were required to bid on days off in order of seniority, or the contract required the Sunday schedule to rotate.
It’s not that simple. Mr. Groff ostensibly asked for Sundays off, for religious purposes. If the employer’s offer did not accommodate that, it doesn’t count as a reasonable accommodation.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the employer loses the case - USPS is off the hook if nobody can come up with an arrangement that accommodates Mr. Groff’s religious needs without imposing a minimal undue hardship on USPS.
Yes, most Christians don’t demand Sundays off. But Goff is saying that, in his view, that is something required of Christians. So unless he can make the case that the Post Office can fill their staffing needs with 35% of their workforce, his requested accommodation is one that, by his own claim, violates the religion of employees.
No, Goff is only saying that it is something that is required of him as a Christian. He doesn’t say that other Christians need to agree with him and that they, too, should be taking Sundays off.
The number of employees who actually do seek Sundays off on religious grounds is a relevant factor in determining what is a “reasonable accommodation” to make to them since, obviously, it might be reasonable to expect an employer to offer to a handful of people something which could not reasonably be expected to be offered to the vast bulk of the workforce.