Workers with religious objections to vaccine mandates have stronger legal claims now that the US Supreme Court has developed a new standard strengthening protections for workplace religious accommodations.
The court unanimously ruled June 29 that an employer cannot deny a religious accommodation under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act unless it can show that the burden of granting that accommodation “would result in substantial increased costs” to the business.
This change will impact faith-related discrimination cases currently winding their way through the administrative and judicial system, including those concerning Covid-19 vaccine mandates, lawyers told Bloomberg Law.
The facts in each case may vary, but the new standard nonetheless provides plaintiffs with stronger arguments that seeking an exemption from vaccine policies on religious grounds is a reasonable accommodation, said Matt Durham of Dorsey & Whitney LLP.
“At least going forward, it’s going to put on employers a higher burden to show what the actual cost to their business is when granting an accommodation,” Durham said. “It will embolden the plaintiff’s bar and employees who are seeking religious accommodation to be more aggressive with their claims.”
Many lower courts previously interpreted the decades-old Supreme Court precedent governing religious accommodations to mean that employers can reject a worker’s request if it would impose a minimal, “undue” burden or cost. Those courts got it wrong because they “latched” on to the minimal language as the governing standard, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the high court.
The decision provides a “pathway” for plaintiffs in pending cases to ask lower court judges to reconsider previous rulings affirming the denial of their religious accommodation “because the rule of law has changed,” said Marjorie Mesidor, a partner at Wigdor LLP.
“It’s not so much that it would be applied retroactively. But in cases pending right now, this is going to give further guidance on how those matters should be decided,” she said. “It will certainly give stronger legal arguments to employees,” Mesidor added.
‘Middle Standard’
The case involved Gerald Groff, a Christian postal worker who objected to delivering packages for Amazon.com Inc. on Sundays. A divided US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit panel rejected his religious bias claim, relying on the high court’s 1977 decision in Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison.
But the justices declined Groff’s bid to overturn Hardison and adopt a stringent standard more like that of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires accommodations unless doing so creates an “undue hardship” on the employer. The ADA defines “undue hardship” as an “action requiring significant difficulty or expense” and provides factors for courts to consider in making that determination.
By deciding not to conform Title VII religious accommodations to the ADA standard, the Supreme Court “in a way, splits the baby” by “creating a middle standard” that’s neither lenient nor too heightened, Durham said.
But “there’s no question” that the ruling will invite further litigation as the case goes back to the lower court, he added.
The justices left it up to lower court judges “to apply our clarified context-specific standard” based on the facts before them. As a result, there needs to be further development on what the new “substantial increased costs” standard actually means, said Patricia Pryor, a shareholder at Jackson Lewis PC.
“We’re in the middle” between Hardison and the ADA standard, Pryor said. “But where that actually falls is what we’ll see through litigation. There’s a lot of litigation going on right now, so hopefully it won’t take another 46 years to straighten that out.”
Cultural Clash?
The Groff decision is seen as a victory for believers of minority faiths like Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs, whose accommodation requests are more likely to face headwinds because their worship, grooming, and dress requirements aren’t always the norm and may conflict with corporate policies.
However, the holding is likely to expand the role of religion to weaken protections for LGBTQ+ people and those seeking access to contraception, Mesidor said.
“There is a belief that there’s a right-wing agenda being pushed through the courts right now because a majority of the justices are conservatives,” she said. “In essence, people were waiting on this ruling to move forward on pushing back on cases that held that religious beliefs could not circumvent” the rights of others with different views.
One case that falls into this bucket involves a Christian teacher’s challenge to his former school’s denial of his request to be exempt from a policy on transgender students’ names and pronouns. The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in April delayed deciding whether the full court will reexamine the case pending the outcome of Groff.
It’s unclear if the teacher’s requested accommodation qualifies as the type of conduct that would result in a “substantial” cost for the school, Mesidor said.
But Groff will shake up the legal landscape and “certainly make it a little harder” for employers to deny religious exemptions to workplace policies, she said.
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