High Court May Toughen Employers ’ Legal Duty To Accommodate Religion

Walter OlsonThe Supreme Court last week agreed to hearGroff v.DeJoy, a case on how stringently employers should be obliged to accommodate workers ’ religious practice and belief under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It will revisit the statutory interpretation standard it announced in 1977 inTrans World Airlines v. Hardison, in which employers can turn down religious accommodation requests that subject them to more thande minimis costs. The Court also agreed to revisit the question of whether the employer can justify a refusal of accommodation by pointing to costs inflicted on co ‐​workers, as opposed to on itself.It ’s been on the table for a while that a significant number of Justices want to revisit and toughen theTWA v.Hardison standard. Concurring in a 2020 case calledPatterson v.Walgreen, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas,indicated as much. As I wrote then, citing myCato Supreme Court Review article on the 2015 hijab case,EEOC v.Abercrombie& Fitch:basically,Hardison let employers off easy, at the semantic cost of defining a term of art, “undue hardship,” in a way almost comically opposite to the way it has since come to be used in, say, ADA cases. One result is that religious discrimination complaints in the workplace, while growing, have not emerged as a massive headache for management, nor have they blown up as a series of regular culture war showdowns...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs