SUPREME COURT OF THE
UNITED STATES _________________ No. 22–174 _________________ GERALD E.
GROFF, PETITIONER v. LOUIS DeJOY, POSTMASTER GENERAL on writ of certiorari to
the united states court of appeals
for the third circuit [June 29, 2023] Justice Alito delivered the opinion
of the Court. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of
1964 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.” 78Stat.
253, as amended, 42 U. S. C. §2000e(j). Many lower courts,
including the Third
Circuit below, have interpreted “undue hardship” to mean
any effort or cost
that is “more than . . . de minimis.” In this case,
however, both parties—the
plaintiff-petitioner, Gerald Groff, and the
defendant-respondent, the
Postmaster General, represented by the Solicitor
General—agree that the de
minimis reading of Hardison is a mistake. With the benefit
of thorough briefing
and oral argument, we today clarify what Title VII
requires. I Gerald Groff is an Evangelical
Christian who believes for
religious reasons that Sunday should be devoted to worship
and rest, not
“secular labor” and the “transport[ation]” of worldly
“goods.” Groff began his
employment with the United States Postal Service (USPS),
which has more than
600,000 employees. He became a Rural Carrier Associate, a
job that required him
to assist regular carriers in the delivery of mail. When
he took the position,
it generally did not involve Sunday work. But within a few
years, that changed.
In 2013, USPS entered into an agreement with Amazon to
begin facilitating
Sunday deliveries, and in 2016, USPS signed a memorandum
of understanding with
the relevant union (the National Rural Letter Carriers’
Association) that set
out how Sunday and holiday parcel delivery would be
handled. During a 2-month
peak season, each post office would use its own staff to
deliver packages. At
all other times, Sunday and holiday deliveries would be
carried out by
employees (including Rural Carrier Associates like Groff)
working from a
“regional hub.” For Quarryville, Pennsylvania, where Groff
was originally
stationed, the regional hub was the Lancaster Annex. The memorandum specifies the order in
which USPS employees
are to be called on for Sunday work outside the peak
season. First in line are
each hub’s “Assistant Rural Carriers”— part-time employees
who are assigned to
the hub and cover only Sundays and holidays. Second are
any volunteers from the
geographic area, who are assigned on a rotating basis. And
third are all other
carriers, who are compelled to do the work on a rotating
basis. Groff fell into
this third category, and after the memorandum of
understanding was adopted, he
was told that he would be required to work on Sunday. He
then sought and
received a transfer to Holtwood, a small rural USPS
station that had only seven
employees and that, at the time, did not make Sunday
deliveries. But in March
2017, Amazon deliveries began there as well. With Groff unwilling to work on
Sundays, USPS made other
arrangements. During the peak season, Sunday deliveries
that would have
otherwise been performed by Groff were carried out by the
rest of the Holtwood
staff, including the postmaster, whose job ordinarily does
not involve
delivering mail. During other months, Groff ’s Sunday
assignments were
redistributed to other carriers assigned to the regional
hub. Throughout this
time, Groff continued to receive “progressive discipline”
for failing to work
on Sundays. Groff resigned. A few months later, Groff sued under
Title VII, asserting
that USPS could have accommodated his Sunday Sabbath
practice “without undue
hardship on the conduct of [USPS’s] business.” The
District Court granted summary
judgment to USPS, and the Third Circuit affirmed. We granted Groff ’s ensuing petition
for a writ of
certiorari. II Because this case presents our first
opportunity in nearly
50 years to explain the contours of Hardison, we begin by
recounting the legal
backdrop to that case, including the development of the
Title VII provision
barring religious discrimination and the Equal Employment
Opportunity
Commission’s (EEOC’s) regulations and guidance regarding
that prohibition. We
then summarize how the Hardison case progressed to final
decision, and finally,
we discuss how courts and the EEOC have understood its
significance. This
background helps to explain the clarifications we offer
today. A Since its passage, Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964
has made it unlawful for covered employers “to fail or
refuse to hire or to
discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate
against any individual
with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or
privileges [of]
employment, because of such individual’s . . . religion.”
As originally
enacted, Title VII did not spell out what it meant by
discrimination “because
of . . . religion,” but shortly after the statute’s
passage, the EEOC
interpreted that provision to mean that employers were
sometimes required to
“accommodate” the “reasonable religious needs of
employees.” After some
tinkering, the EEOC settled on a formulation that
obligated employers “to make
reasonable accommodations to the religious needs of
employees” whenever that
would not work an “undue hardship on the conduct of the
employer’s business.” Between 1968 and 1972, the EEOC
elaborated on its
understanding of “undue hardship” in a “long line of
decisions” addressing a
variety of policies. Those decisions addressed many
accommodation issues that
still arise frequently today, including the wearing of
religious garb and time
off from work to attend to religious obligations. EEOC decisions did not settle the
question of undue
hardship. In 1970, the Sixth Circuit held (in a Sabbath
case) that Title VII as
then written did not require an employer “to accede to or
accommodate”
religious practice because that “would raise grave”
Establishment Clause
questions. Responding to Dewey and another
decision rejecting any duty
to accommodate an employee’s observance of the Sabbath,
Congress amended Title
VII in 1972. Tracking the EEOC’s regulatory language,
Congress provided that
“[t]he term ‘religion’ includes all aspects of religious
observance and
practice, as well as belief, unless an employer
demonstrates that he is unable
to reasonably accommodate to an employee’s or prospective
employee’s religious
observance or practice without undue hardship on the
conduct of the employer’s
business.” B The Hardison case concerned a dispute
that arose during the
interval between the issuance of the EEOC’s ”undue
hardship” regulation and the
1972 amendment to Title VII. In 1967, Larry Hardison was
hired as a clerk at
the Stores Department in the Kansas City base of Trans
World Airlines (TWA).
The Stores Department was responsible for providing parts
needed to repair and
maintain aircraft. It played an “essential role” and
operated “24 hours per
day, 365 days per year.” After taking this job, Hardison
underwent a religious
conversion. He began to observe the Sabbath by absenting
himself from work from
sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, and this
conflicted with his work
schedule. Attempts at accommodation failed, and he was
eventually “discharged
on grounds of insubordination.” Hardison sued TWA and his union, the
International
Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM).[5]
The Eighth Circuit
found that reasonable accommodations were available, and
it rejected the
defendants’ Establishment Clause arguments. Both TWA and
IAM then filed
petitions for certiorari. The Court granted both
petitions. Applying this interpretation of Title
VII and disagreeing
with the Eighth Circuit’s evaluation of the factual
record, the Court
identified no way in which TWA, without violating
seniority rights, could have
feasibly accommodated Hardison’s request for an exemption
from work on his
Sabbath. The Court found that not enough co-workers were
willing to take
Hardison’s shift voluntarily, that compelling them to do
so would have violated
their seniority rights, and that leaving the Stores
Department short-handed
would have adversely affected its “essential” mission. In the briefs and at argument, little
space was devoted to
the question of determining when increased costs amount to
an “undue hardship”
under the statute, but a single, but oft-quoted, sentence
in the opinion of the
Court, if taken literally, suggested that even a pittance
might be too much for
an employer to be forced to endure. The line read as
follows: “To require TWA
to bear more than a de minimis cost in order to give
Hardison Saturdays off is
an undue hardship.” Although this line would later be
viewed by many lower
courts as the authoritative interpretation of the
statutory term “undue
hardship,” it is doubtful that it was meant to take on
that large role. III 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. Hardison cannot be reduced to
that one phrase. In
describing an employer’s “undue hardship” defense,
Hardison referred repeatedly
to “substantial” burdens, and that formulation better
explains the decision. We
therefore, like the parties, understand Hardison to mean
that “undue hardship”
is shown when a burden is substantial in the overall
context of an employer’s
business. A As we have explained, we do not write
on a blank slate in
determining what an employer must prove to defend a denial
of a religious
accommodation, but we think it reasonable to begin with
Title VII’s text. After
all, as we have stressed over and over again in recent
years, statutory
interpretation must “begi[n] with,” and ultimately heed,
what a statute
actually says.Here, the key statutory term is “undue
hardship.” In common
parlance, a “hardship” is, at a minimum, “something hard
to bear.” But under
any definition, a hardship is more severe than a mere
burden. So even if Title
VII said only that an employer need not be made to suffer
a “hardship,” an
employer could not escape liability simply by showing that
an accommodation would
impose some sort of additional costs. Those costs would
have to rise to the
level of hardship, and adding the modifier “undue” means
that the requisite
burden, privation, or adversity must rise to an
“excessive” or “unjustifiable”
level. When “undue hardship” is understood in
this way, it means
something very different from a burden that is merely more
than de minimis,
i.e., something that is “very small or trifling.” So
considering ordinary
meaning while taking Hardison as a given, we are pointed
toward something
closer to Hardison’s references to “substantial additional
costs” or
“substantial expenditures.”. B In this case, both parties agree that
the “de minimis” test
is not right, but they differ slightly in the alternative
language they prefer.
Groff likes the phrase “significant difficulty or
expense.” The Government,
disavowing its prior position that Title VII’s text
requires overruling
Hardison, points us to Hardison’s repeated references to
“substantial
expenditures” or “substantial additional costs.” We think
it is enough to say
that an 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. What 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 in the
case at hand,
including the particular accommodations at issue and their
practical impact in
light of the nature, “size and operating cost of [an]
employer.” IV Having clarified the Title VII
undue-hardship standard, we
think it appropriate to leave the context-specific
application of that
clarified standard to the lower courts in the first
instance. The Third Circuit
assumed that Hardison prescribed a “more than a de minimis
cost” test, and this
may have led the court to dismiss a number of possible
accommodations,
including those involving the cost of incentive pay, or
the administrative
costs of coordination with other nearby stations with a
broader set of
employees. Without foreclosing the possibility that USPS
will prevail, we think
it appropriate to leave it to the lower courts to apply
our clarified
context-specific standard, and to decide whether any
further factual
development is needed. * * * |