After Sherbert v. Verner, a 1963 Supreme Court case that granted a Seventh-day Adventist the right to take her chosen day of worship (Saturday) off without recrimination from employers, I thought the right to not work on a particular day of the week had been settled.
But apparently not, especially if the employer’s needs shift over time.
At this point, the original promise to the employee that he/she would not have to work on a religious holiday goes out the window. Especially if Amazon is involved. This creates an interesting news dynamic, by the way, because the titan of Amazon is, of course, Jeff Bezos — owner of The Washington Post and a major player on the cultural left (except when it comes to labor issues).
First, there is this from USA Today:
Gerald Groff wanted to spend his Sundays at church. His employer, the U.S. Postal Service, wanted him delivering packages.
That simple dispute between an employee and his managers sparked one of the most significant religious cases to reach the Supreme Court in years – with the potential to shift the balance of power between employees and employers over weekend schedules, dress codes and how workers conduct themselves around colleagues.
The appeal raises a basic question with potentially sweeping consequences: How far must large employers go to accommodate the religious needs of their workers? For Groff, an Evangelical Christian who told his boss in 2017 that he wouldn’t cover Sunday shifts because of his faith, the answer became a personal and painful one.
Then, instead of referring to the abovementioned 1963 case, the article refers to Trans World Airlines, Inc., v. Hardison, an airline maintenance clerk who was discharged for refusing to work Saturdays.
Larry Hardison, a Worldwide Church of God adherent, had switched to his new faith just after he was hired and for a time, he was able to observe his new faith’s requirement that one not work on the Sabbath. Then he switched positions and lost his seniority and his ability to decline Saturday shifts. Hardison sued the airline, but lost.
I wasn’t wild about the first part of the USA Today coverage, because it portrayed the Court’s conservative majority as wanting to turn workplaces into unfettered hives of religious accommodation.
Where this case gets interesting is further down in the text. Groff, a former missionary, had struck a deal with his employer that he was not to work Sundays, and for several years, the postal service kept its side of the bargain. Then in 2013, the ground shifted. Amazon signed a contract with the USPS –- which really needed the money –- to deliver its packages on Sundays.
Groff managed to avoid the Sunday shifts for several years by working holidays for other employees. He even switched to a more remote location — with a cut in salary? — in the hopes that workers there would not have to work for Amazon. No such luck. As NPR said:
The problem for Groff was that he didn't want to ever work Sundays, and the problem for the Postal Service was — and is — that it is chronically understaffed, especially in rural areas. To solve that problem, the Postal Service pools its employees from multiple post offices in a rural area to work on a regular Sunday rotation.
By 2018, his colleagues were grumbling about having to work on Sundays. Groff resigned in 2019, then sued. Unfortunately, USA Today picked two worst-case scenarios as to what could happen should Groff win. GetReligion readers will be shocked, shocked to discover that Sexual Revolution issues get involved:
Groff's case could affect more than a company’s scheduling, experts say. A win for Groff, for instance, might help a teacher who, based on religious beliefs, declines to use transgender pronouns in the classroom. It could give a boost to pharmacists who decline to fill birth control prescriptions based on religion.
Well, it could also benefit Muslims who don’t want to work during the holidays that close off Ramadan, or faithful Jews who want their sabbaths off.
We could name a dozen other examples. Check this out. SCOTUSblog.co, says that friend-of-the-court briefs were filed by the Adventists, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus and Jews, along with other church-state activists. Practitioners of minority religions, they said, need more workplace accommodations because America’s Christian culture doesn’t automatically give them days off in the same way Christmas and Easter are always off.
The case went before the court and — to the delight of certain outlets — the Supremes seemed a bit leery of Groff’s side of the story.
One of the worst headlines “The Supreme Court is unlikely to put the Christian Right in charge of your workplace — at least not yet,” belonged to Vox’s coverage of Groff v. DeJoy. (The story itself wasn’t bad, but seriously, the headline was awful.) The story said, in part:
At the same time, several justices also acknowledged that cases involving workers who seek religious accommodations are, in Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s words, “all context specific” — and thus it is hard to come up with a broad legal framework that governs all requests for religious accommodations.
It might be reasonable, for example, to allow a worker at an Amazon warehouse, where many other employees are available to cover one employee’s time away from work, to take a few hours off to attend a church service. But it might not be reasonable to grant this same accommodation to a grocery store employee who works in a shop with only two other co-workers.
I did have a problem when, later on, the story suggested that increased religious protections on work schedules would allow religious employees to harass gay people. Like — huh?
One thing I did not see brought up in any of the coverage was how Amazon changed the nature of the church-state game by requiring postal employees to work Sundays.
That’s called shifting the goalposts or changing the conditions of the job in a major way. And one could ask: Why does Amazon get to influence this situation? The USPS is totally to blame here, as the worker warned them from the beginning that he couldn’t work on Sundays. But once Amazon began waving money in front of the postal service, the fact that thousands of postal service workers would have to now work Sundays was swept underneath the rug.
That’s the untold story of this case. How capitalism and the insistence of American consumers on getting their packages within the Prime-allotted deadline of a day or two has upended an American institution’s ability to give its employees one day off.
The way Sunday delivery was sold to the public was that your typical postal worker wouldn’t have to do that shift. See this 2014 Geekwire story and scroll down toward the bottom for an example — supposedly a corps of part-time workers was going to do the work.
Well, guess not. Tough luck for folks like Groff who took a job with the postal service thinking they were safe.
One very good treatment of this dilemma is this Christianity Today piece,
Howard Friedman, University of Toledo law professor emeritus, has seen reasonable-accommodation cases continue to rise on his blog Religion Clause. Seventh-day Adventists and Orthodox Jews had often come up in religious accommodation cases because their conviction to rest and worship on Saturdays put them in conflict with typical work schedules.
“Historically, work schedules and holidays tended to be in line with Christian (or at least mainline Protestant) religious and holiday schedules and practices,” he said. “More recently, as we have moved to a 24/7 economy, Sunday work schedules have become more common and pose conflicts for Christians that previously were felt mainly by minority religions.”
When I took on the religion beat, I knew I’d be working on weekends and religious holidays. Medical folks know this too and there are other occupations where working on one’s religious day of rest comes with the job. But for lots of people, it doesn’t and it is unfair for reporters to treat these folks like religious fanatics who lose basic rights extended to religious minorities.
So, what should we do? Christianity Today had this suggestion:
Such Sabbath observance is becoming more countercultural in the busy, hyperproductive 21st century. Believers who avoid shopping or eating out on Sundays as a part of their Sabbath observance do so in the midst of an always-on economy where an Amazon package could land at their door while they’re at church.
“When Amazon started kind of out of the blue doing Sunday delivery, we got burned a couple of times, so Christians need to be very careful if they want to be serious about this and protect people like these [drivers],” said Joseph A. Pipa Jr., president emeritus of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. “We’re very careful to delay our order a day if it means they are going to deliver it on the Lord’s Day or pay attention to when it’s going to be delivered.”
That is the kind of basic coverage that went totally missing in the mainstream press.