CNN —
The Supreme Court revived the case of a former mail carrier, an evangelical Christian, who said the United States Postal Service violated federal law by failing to reasonably accommodate his inability to work on Sundays.
The court said unanimously that a lower court was too quick to deny the employee’s request for accommodation and should take another look at the impact the request would have on the Postal Service as a whole.
“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,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote, penning the court’s opinion. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a concurrence joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
A lower court had ruled against the worker, Gerald Groff, holding that his request would cause an undue hardship on the Postal Service and lead to low morale at the workplace when other employees had to pick up his shifts.
The new ruling, in clarifying previous precedent for religious accommodations, will likely make it harder for an employer to refuse to accommodate the religious beliefs of an employee under Title VII of the civil rights law. The Supreme Court left the door open that the Postal Service might still prevail in the case, and the justices said they were leaving it to the lower court to revisit the case under the clarified standard.
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