Global Courant 2023-04-17 23:32:23
LANCASTER, PA — Gerald Groff loved his job as a postal worker in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. For years he delivered mail and all kinds of packages: a car bumper, a mini-fridge, a 70-pound box of horseshoes for a blacksmith. But when an Amazon.com contract with the postal service required carriers to start delivering packages on Sundays, Groff refused. As a Christian, he told his employers that he could not deliver packages on the Day of the Lord.
Now Groff’s dispute with the Post Office has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear his case on Tuesday. Lower courts have sided with the Post Office, which says Groff’s demand for Sundays off meant extra work for other workers and created tension. Groff, for his part, argues that employers too readily reject employee requests for religious accommodations, and if he wins, that could change.
“We really can’t go back and change what happened to me,” said Groff, who eventually quit his job during Sunday services. But he says other people “shouldn’t have to choose between their jobs and their beliefs.”
Groff’s case concerns Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination in the workplace. The law requires employers to accommodate employees’ religious practices unless doing so would constitute an “unnecessary hardship” for the company.
Groff grew up in Lancaster County, where he attended Mennonite schools and lived in a house across the street from his grandparents’ farm. His grandfather’s death around the time he graduated from high school was a turning point for him, he said, and motivated him to become a missionary. Although he has a college degree in biology, over the years he has completed eight missionary journeys ranging from two months to two years that have taken him to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In between he did various jobs, but in 2012 he found a job at the post office, where he regularly filled in as a postman when other carriers were free or sick.
“I really enjoyed the track from the start. You are in the countryside, in the fresh air… It is a beautiful place to live and work and I really enjoyed it and planned to make a career out of it unless somewhere God called me back to the mission field, Groff said of his job as an employee of a rural courier.
As a stand-in postman, he eventually learned 22 different routes, which he would drive in his Honda CR-V, hitting 500 to 800 mailboxes a day. Eventually he hoped to become a regular postman, with his own fixed route.
Shortly after Groff joined the post office, however, it signed a contract with Amazon to deliver packages on Sundays. And about four years into the job, Groff was told to start running his share of Sunday services. Groff said no. Sunday, he says, is “a day when we gather as Christian believers and honor the Lord’s day.”
“And to give that up, to deliver Amazon packages, would mean giving up everything we believe in,” Groff said.
To avoid Sunday work, Groff gave up his seniority at the post office in rural Quarryville, Pennsylvania, where the parking lot has two spaces marked “HORSE AND VEHICLE ONLY”. He moved to a smaller office in nearby Holtwood, which was not yet doing Sunday deliveries. Eventually, however, Sunday deliveries also had to be made there.
Groff told his supervisor he would work extra shifts and holidays to avoid Sundays. The supervisor tried to find other carriers for Groff’s Sunday services, even though finding replacements was time consuming and not always possible. Groff’s absence, meanwhile, created a tense atmosphere, sparked resentment toward management and contributed to morale problems, officials said. It also meant that other carriers had to work more Sundays or sometimes deliver more Sunday mail than they would otherwise. One carrier switched and another resigned in part because of the situation, Groff’s supervisor said.
In the end, however, Groff missed enough Sundays to be disciplined. He resigned in 2019 rather than wait for his resignation, he said, and subsequently filed a lawsuit alleging religious discrimination.
Groff says that according to a 1977 Supreme Court case, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, employers don’t have to show much to prove unreasonable hardship and can deny religious accommodations to employees when they “cost more than a de minimis impose on the company. The case was 7-2 in favor of TWA with both Liberals and Conservatives in the majority.
But Groff’s attorney, Hiram Sasser of the First Liberty Institute, says the Hardison case “piled the deck against workers and the common people.” “They have to climb Kilimanjaro to try and win one of their cases, and, I mean, that’s not right,” he said.
Groff wants the Supreme Court to say employers must demonstrate “considerable effort or expense” if they want to turn down a religious accommodation.
Biden administration lawyers representing the Post Office say Hardison needs to be clarified to make it clear that it provides substantial protection for religious observance. But the administration also says that when accommodating an employee’s religious practices adversely affects other employees, that could be an unnecessary hardship for a company.
Groff seems to have the upper hand. Three current justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – have said the court should reconsider Hardison. And in recent years, the court’s conservative majority has been particularly sympathetic to the concerns of religious prosecutors.
Last year, for example, the court sided with another First Liberty client, a public high school football coach who wanted to be able to kneel and pray on the field after games.
Groff, for his part, has found other employment since leaving the post office. Today he is essentially the postal worker of a retirement home with a population of several thousand. He oversees a staff of volunteer residents who sort the mail every day except Sunday and put it in the mailboxes.
There are also no deliveries to Groff’s house on Sundays. He says he went in and took them out on Amazon.
“I can wait for that stuff,” he said. “And when I need it so badly, I’ll go to the store and get it.”
