Groff v. DeJoy

Facts

Title VII requires employers “to accommodate the religious practice of their employees unless doing so would impose an ‘undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.’” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 453–454; 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(j).) Congress added that definition of “religion” by the 1972 amendments, tracking EEOC regulatory language, after an evenly divided Court had affirmed a decision holding that Title VII as then written did not require Sabbath accommodation. (Id. at pp. 458–459.)

Gerald Groff “is an Evangelical Christian who believes for religious reasons that Sunday should be devoted to worship and rest, not ‘secular labor.’” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 454.) He began work in 2012 as a Rural Carrier Associate for the Postal Service, a job that “generally did not involve Sunday work.” (Ibid.) That changed after USPS agreed in 2013 to facilitate Sunday deliveries for Amazon. (Ibid.) Groff transferred to a small rural station that did not yet make Sunday deliveries, but Amazon deliveries began there too in March 2017. (Id. at p. 455.) With Groff unwilling to work Sundays, USPS redistributed his Sunday assignments to other carriers and the postmaster; “[o]ther employees complained,” and at least one filed a grievance. (Id. at p. 455 & n. 1.) Groff received “‘progressive discipline’ for failing to work on Sundays” and eventually resigned. (Id. at pp. 455–456.)

Procedural history

Groff sued under Title VII, asserting that USPS could have accommodated his Sabbath practice “‘without undue hardship on the conduct of [USPS’s] business.’” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 456.) The District Court granted summary judgment for USPS, and the Third Circuit affirmed, feeling “‘bound by [the] ruling’ in Hardison,” which it construed to mean “‘that requiring an employer “to bear more than a de minimis cost” to provide a religious accommodation is an undue hardship.’” (Ibid.) The panel found that standard met because exempting Groff “‘imposed on his coworkers, disrupted the workplace and workflow, and diminished employee morale,’” over Judge Hardiman’s dissent that effects on coworkers did not alone show hardship “‘on the employer’s business.’” (Ibid.) The Supreme Court granted certiorari and, by a unanimous opinion, vacated and remanded. (Id. at pp. 456, 472–473.)

Issue

What an employer must prove to establish “undue hardship” and thereby defeat a Title VII religious-accommodation claim — specifically, whether Hardison’s oft-quoted “more than a de minimis cost” line states the governing test. A second, related question concerned how effects on coworkers bear on the analysis. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 453–454, 471–472.)

Holding

Reasoning

Hardison “cannot be reduced to” the de minimis line. The Court’s central move was to recover the actual reasoning of Hardison. That 1977 decision arose before the 1972 amendments and turned on a seniority dispute; “constitutional concerns played no on-stage role,” and “the principal issue” was whether Title VII required an employer and union to override a bona fide seniority system to accommodate a junior employee. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 460–462.) Against that, the “more than a de minimis cost” sentence was “fleeting in comparison to its discussion of the ‘principal issue’ of seniority rights,” and was “undercut by conflicting language”: in responding to Justice Marshall’s dissent, Hardison “stat[ed] three times that an accommodation is not required when it entails ‘substantial’ ‘costs’ or ‘expenditures.’” (Id. at pp. 464–465.) The Court therefore “understand[s] Hardison to mean that ‘undue hardship’ is shown when a burden is substantial in the overall context of an employer’s business.” (Id. at p. 468.)

The historical backdrop explains why the gloss took hold. The Court reconstructed how a stray phrase came to govern. Title VII as originally enacted “did not spell out what it meant by discrimination ‘because of . . . religion,’” and the duty to accommodate grew first from EEOC regulation. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 457–458.) After the Sixth Circuit held in Dewey v. Reynolds Metals Co. that requiring Sabbath accommodation would “‘raise grave’ Establishment Clause questions,” and this Court affirmed “by an evenly divided vote,” Congress responded with the 1972 amendments codifying the “undue hardship” standard. (Id. at pp. 458–459.) When Hardison reached the Court in 1977, the live concern was constitutional — the now-abrogated Lemon v. Kurtzman test loomed over any religious accommodation — yet “constitutional concerns played no on-stage role in the Court’s opinion, which focused instead on seniority rights.” (Id. at pp. 460–462.) Understanding that the “de minimis” line was a near-aside in a seniority case, not a considered construction of “undue hardship,” is what licensed the Court to recover the statute’s actual meaning without overruling precedent.

The statutory text drives the standard. Beginning, as it must, with “what a statute actually says,” the Court parsed “undue hardship.” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 468.) A “hardship” is “‘something hard to bear’” and “more severe than a mere burden,” so an employer “could not escape liability simply by showing that an accommodation would impose some sort of additional costs.” (Ibid.) Adding the modifier “undue” means “the requisite burden, privation, or adversity must rise to an ‘excessive’ or ‘unjustifiable’ level” — “something very different from a burden that is merely more than de minimis, i.e., something that is ‘very small or trifling.’” (Id. at pp. 468–469.) Ordinary meaning thus “points toward a standard closer to Hardison’s references to ‘substantial additional costs’ or ‘substantial expenditures.’” (Id. at p. 469.)

Why the de minimis gloss was a problem. The Court documented the practical stakes: “a bevy of diverse religious organizations” reported that “the de minimis test has blessed the denial of even minor accommodation in many cases, making it harder for members of minority faiths to enter the job market” — Sabbatarians, observant Jews, Muslim women in religious attire, and Sikhs among them. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 465–466.) Even the EEOC had tried to “soften” the standard, cautioning against treating administrative costs, occasional premium pay, and voluntary swaps as undue hardship, yet “some courts ha[d] rejected even the EEOC’s gloss.” (Id. at pp. 466–467.) The Solicitor General agreed Hardison should not be read “‘literally’ or in a manner that undermines Hardison’s references to ‘substantial’ cost.” (Id. at pp. 467–468.)

The chosen formulation — and the limits the Court declined to add. The Court adopted the Government’s phrasing — “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business” — but cautioned that “[w]hat matters more than a favored synonym for ‘undue hardship’ (which is the actual text) is that courts must apply the test in a manner that takes into account all relevant factors,” including the accommodation’s “practical impact in light of the nature, size, and operating cost of [an] employer.” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 470–471.) It declined Groff’s request to import the ADA’s “significant difficulty or expense” caselaw wholesale, and declined the Government’s request to bless the EEOC’s body of guidance “in toto,” stressing instead that “‘undue hardship’ . . . means what it says” and should be applied “in the common-sense manner.” (Id. at p. 471.)

Clarifying the coworker and reasonableness questions. The Court resolved two recurring issues. First, Title VII requires assessing the accommodation’s effect on “‘the conduct of the employer’s business’”; “[a]n accommodation’s effect on co-workers may have ramifications for the conduct of the employer’s business, but a court cannot stop its analysis without examining whether that further logical step is shown in a particular case,” and a “hardship that is attributable to employee animosity to a particular religion, to religion in general, or to the very notion of accommodating religious practice, cannot be considered ‘undue.’” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 472.) “If bias or hostility to a religious practice or a religious accommodation provided a defense to a reasonable accommodation claim, Title VII would be at war with itself.” (Ibid.) Second, Title VII requires an employer to “reasonably accommodate” the practice, “not merely [to] assess the reasonableness of a particular possible accommodation”; faced with a request like Groff’s, “it would not be enough . . . to conclude that forcing other employees to work overtime would constitute an undue hardship,” because “[c]onsideration of other options, such as voluntary shift swapping, would also be necessary.” (Id. at pp. 472–473.) The Court left the “context-specific application” to the lower courts on remand. (Id. at p. 473.)

The concurrence. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, wrote separately to underscore that the Court wisely declined to overrule Hardison — statutory stare decisis has “enhanced force,” and Congress had “spurned multiple opportunities” to revise the decision. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at pp. 474–475.) She emphasized that some effects on coworkers can constitute undue hardship: because “the ‘conduct of [a] business’ plainly includes the management and performance of the business’s employees,” undue hardship “on the conduct of a business may include undue hardship on the business’s employees,” even as animus and trivial costs remain off the table. (Id. at pp. 475–476.)

Significance

Groff is the most consequential Title VII religious-accommodation decision in nearly half a century, displacing the “more than a de minimis cost” standard that had governed the lower courts since 1977. By recentering the inquiry on the statutory words “undue hardship” and equating that with a “substantial” cost “in relation to the conduct of [the employer’s] particular business,” the decision materially raises the employer’s burden and revives the viability of accommodation claims that the de minimis gloss had routinely defeated — Sabbath observance, religious dress and grooming, and time off for religious obligations. Its two clarifications are equally important in practice: coworker grievances and morale are not freestanding hardships unless they “affect the conduct of the business,” and coworker or customer hostility to religion or to accommodation itself can never be an undue hardship. The decision also reframes the employer’s duty as one to accommodate the practice — requiring consideration of the full menu of options (shift swaps, schedule adjustments, coordination with other facilities) — rather than to reject a single proposed accommodation. Although Groff construes federal law, it bears on California practice as persuasive authority: California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act independently requires religious accommodation absent “undue hardship,” a term FEHA defines by reference to the more demanding multi-factor “significant difficulty or expense” standard (Gov. Code, §§ 12940, subd. (l), 12926, subd. (u)). Groff narrows the historical gap between the two regimes.

The decision is also notable for its restraint, which shapes how lower courts must use it. The Court deliberately declined to convert “undue hardship” into a borrowed term of art — refusing both Groff’s invitation to graft on “‘decades of ADA caselaw’” and the Government’s request to ratify the EEOC’s body of guidance “in toto” — and instead instructed courts to apply the statutory words “‘in the common-sense manner’” on the facts of each case. (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 471.) The practical consequence is a fact-intensive, employer-specific inquiry rather than a bright-line rule, in which the size, operating cost, and nature of the business all bear on whether a given accommodation’s cost is “substantial.” That design preserves much sensible EEOC guidance — on temporary costs, voluntary and occasional shift swaps, and administrative costs — while removing the de minimis thumb on the scale that had let employers defeat accommodation requests almost reflexively. The Sotomayor concurrence’s clarification that hardship “on the conduct of [the] business” can include hardship on the business’s employees, so long as it is neither trivial nor rooted in animus, will be where much of the post-Groff litigation is fought. (Id. at pp. 475–476.)

Key quotes

“We hold that showing ‘more than a de minimis cost,’ as that phrase is used in common parlance, does not suffice to establish ‘undue hardship’ under Title VII.” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 468.)

“[A]n employer must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.” (Id. at p. 470.)

“[A] hardship that is attributable to employee animosity to a particular religion, to religion in general, or to the very notion of accommodating religious practice, cannot be considered ‘undue.’” (Id. at p. 472.)

Read the full opinion (official slip opinion, PDF) →

Practice pointer

Open questions

The Court “le[ft] the context-specific application of [the] clarified standard . . . to the lower courts in the first instance,” expressly declining to decide whether USPS would prevail on remand and whether “further factual development is needed.” (Groff, supra, 600 U.S. at p. 473.) It also declined to define the standard further — refusing both to “draw upon decades of ADA caselaw” and to ratify the EEOC’s guidance “in toto” — so the precise contours of “substantial increased costs” for employers of varying size remain to be worked out case by case. (Id. at p. 471.) The opinion does not resolve when, if ever, lost efficiency, the indefinite payment of premium wages, or burdens on a bona fide seniority system cross from permissible to “undue,” though it signals that Hardison’s seniority holding survives. (Id. at p. 462, fn. 10.) Finally, the Court reserved a jurisdictional-overlap question it had no need to reach — whether Religious Freedom Restoration Act claims arising out of federal employment are displaced by Title VII — because Groff brought no RFRA claim. (Id. at pp. 467–468, fn. 14.)