Despite Mail Carrier’s Supreme Court Win, US Postal Service Still Fights Religious Accommodation
As a Christian, Gerald E. Groff tries to put God first in his life. He never dreamed his simple conviction, to keep the Sabbath holy, would mean losing his postal carrier job and winning a U.S. Supreme Court case defending his faith.
Almost two years since his June 2023 Supreme Court win, Groff, 47, awaits a jury trial date, expected soon, in the original case he brought against the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). He is seeking a religious accommodation that would allow him to observe the Sabbath based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Groff, of Lancaster County Pennsylvania, was hired as a Rural Carrier Associate (RCA) in July 2012. At the time, the USPS was not delivering mail on Sundays in his region. It worked out well for Groff because he observes the Sabbath on Sunday.
The RCA position is considered part-time, offering no health insurance benefits. RCAs can get close to full time hours, but often they don’t have a route of their own; they handle many different ones, filling in when regular carriers are off. With seniority, an RCA can eventually request full time status and get benefits.
In 2016, a USPS agreement with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays and holidays started affecting Groff’s region.
The USPS has argued in court transcripts that allowing Groff to take off every Sunday would create “substantial costs” including “Significant effects on his coworkers” and would a violate an agreement between the union and the USPS.
USPS signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association defining how Sunday and holiday parcel delivery would be handled. It specifies the order USPS employees are to be called for Sunday work. First in line are each hub’s “Assistant Rural Carriers” — part-time employees who cover only Sundays and holidays. Second are any volunteers, and third are all other carriers, who are compelled to do the work on a rotating basis. “Groff fell into this third category,” Supreme Court papers say. “After the the memorandum of understanding was adopted, he was told that he would be required to work on Sunday.”
God Vs. Amazon Packages
Groff’s faith calls on him to keep the Sabbath holy by honoring God’s command to rest and to keep the day sacred.
“It’s about putting God first. That’s my personal conviction,” Groff told The Federalist. “It’s like the tithe, where we give our first fruits to God to honor him and recognize that he’s the one who gives us strength and breath to live. It’s about also, giving that first day of the week to the Lord to say, I’m putting you first. I want you to be my first love. I want you to be the reason I’m living. And I’m not going to sacrifice that to deliver Amazon packages.”
RCAs are now required to work Sundays, but regular, full-time carriers are not.
“I tried to find a way to make it work,” Groff told The Federalist. At first, his postmaster was willing to accommodate him. He worked extra time on Saturdays and holidays, but eventually the accommodation stopped.
“She said, ‘I’m not going to put up with this again this year. You either have to work on Sundays, or you’re going to have to quit and find another job,’” Groff said.
He gave up his RCA seniority to transfer to another post office, so small that carriers were not required to work Sundays. About three months later, the policy changed. Sundays were required for RCAs even at the small post offices. He had given up seniority and was still required to work Sundays.
Ironically, if he had worked Sundays, and kept his seniority, it would not have been long before Groff would have been promoted to full-time, making him exempt from working Sundays.
“If it’s truly a principle that you can’t work Sundays, you can’t compromise to work on Sundays in order to get off on Sundays forever,” Attorney Randall Wenger of the Independence Law Center, representing Groff, told The Federalist. “Gerald is somebody who was willing to sacrifice along the way. He wasn’t simply saying, ‘Accommodate me.’ It was, ‘What can I do, even if it hurts?’”
Groff continued asking for religious accommodation, and was willing to work odd hours or extra time during the week in exchange for Sundays off. But USPS put Groff on “progressive discipline,” for failing to work on Sundays. Seeing his days were numbered there, he resigned. He has found work since then, but it is not the same.
“I never really was able to replicate the earning potential I had at the post office,” Groff said. He went to court seeking a permanent injunction preventing the USPS from “engaging in religious discrimination and retaliation” and ordering USPS to “provide equal employment opportunities for religious observance of the Sabbath.”
Before the case was heard, the trial court judge said if an employer encounters anything more than de minimis harm, they don’t have to accommodate the employee.
“And since that was the standard that we had in the trial court, the trial court said, we don’t even need to go to trial because that’s the standard. It’s a bad standard, and it wasn’t in keeping with Congress’ intent,” Wenger said, referring to Congress’ intention when writing the Civil Rights Act. That is the piece that ended up in the Supreme Court where, in a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court strengthened legal protections for employees seeking religious accommodations, such as schedule changes to observe holy days. The decision affects employment rights at every workplace with at least 15 employees in every state in the country.
“The Court held that federal law requires workplaces to accommodate their religious employees unless doing so would cause substantial increased costs on the business,” according to a joint statement from Baker Botts LLP, First Liberty Institute, the Church State Council, Cornerstone Law and the Independence Law Center, which all worked on Groff’s case.
“Previously, employers could avoid granting religious accommodations to employees of faith simply by pointing to trifling, minimal, or ‘de minimis’ effects. This decision means that more employers will be legally required to respect their religious employees by granting them accommodations. Employees of faith often seek religious accommodations to honor their holy days, to take prayer breaks during the day, to dress according to their religious beliefs, or to otherwise not be forced to violate their religious beliefs on the job.”
The Supreme Court’s Groff decision has already been cited in nearly 300 other cases, according to Wenger.
Groff has been waiting for his day in court. After the Supreme Court ruling, USPS tried to delay the case or have it thrown out. Last month. the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania rejected a USPS motion for summary judgement, ordering a trial for Groff.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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