LANCASTER, Pa. — Gerald Groff preferred his paintings as a postal worker in Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. For years, he delivered mail and all method of programs: a automotive bumper, a mini fridge, a 70-pound field of horseshoes for a blacksmith. But when an Amazon.com contract with the Postal Service required carriers to get started handing over programs on Sundays, Groff balked. A Christian, he informed his employers that he could not deliver programs at the Lord’s Day.
Now Groff’s dispute with the Post Office has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which is able to imagine his case Tuesday. Lower courts have sided with the Post Office, which says Groff’s call for for Sundays off intended further paintings for different workers and led to pressure. Groff, for his phase, argues employers can too simply reject workers’ requests for religious lodging, and if he wins, that might alternate.
“We really can’t go back and change what happened to me,” mentioned Groff, who in the end hand over his process over the Sunday shifts. But he says that folks “shouldn’t have to choose between their job and their faith.”
Groff’s case comes to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination in employment. The regulation calls for employers to accommodate workers’ religious practices except doing so could be an “undue hardship” for the industry.
Groff grew up in Lancaster County, the place he attended Mennonite colleges and lived in a house around the boulevard from his grandparents’ farm. His grandfather’s dying across the time he graduated from highschool was once a turning level for him, he mentioned, and helped inspire him to paintings as a missionary. While he has a faculty level in biology, through the years he has long past on 8 undertaking journeys lasting anyplace from two months to two years that took him to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
He did other jobs in between however in 2012 he discovered a task on the Post Office, often filling in as a mail service when different carriers have been off or ill.
“I just really enjoyed the job from the very beginning. You get to be out in the countryside, in the fresh air … It’s a beautiful place to live and work and I just really enjoyed it and planned to make a career of it unless God called me back to the mission field somewhere,” mentioned Groff of his process as a rural service affiliate.
As a fill-in mail service he in the end discovered 22 other routes, which he would force in his Honda CR-V, hitting 500 to 800 mailboxes an afternoon. Eventually, he was hoping to turn into a normal mail service, with a suite course of his personal.
Soon after Groff joined the Post Office, then again, it signed a freelance with Amazon to deliver programs on Sundays. And about 4 years into the process Groff was once informed he’d have to get started operating his percentage of Sunday shifts. Groff mentioned no. Sunday, he says, is “a day we come together as Christian believers and we honor the Lord’s Day.”
“And so to give that up, to deliver Amazon packages would be to give up everything that we believe in,” Groff mentioned.
To steer clear of Sunday paintings, Groff gave up his seniority on the Post Office in rural Quarryville, Pennsylvania, the place the parking zone comprises two areas classified “HORSE AND CARRIAGE ONLY.” He transferred to a smaller administrative center in within sight Holtwood, which was once no longer but doing Sunday deliveries. Eventually, then again, Sunday deliveries have been required there too.
Groff informed his manager he’d paintings further shifts and vacations to steer clear of Sundays. The manager attempted to to find different carriers for Groff’s Sunday shifts, despite the fact that discovering substitutes was once time eating and no longer all the time imaginable. Groff’s absences, in the meantime, created a demanding setting, led to resentment towards control and contributed to morale issues, officers mentioned. It additionally intended different carriers had to paintings extra Sundays or every now and then deliver extra Sunday mail than they another way would. One service transferred and any other resigned in phase on account of the placement, Groff’s manager mentioned.
Eventually, then again, Groff neglected sufficient Sundays that he was once disciplined. He resigned in 2019 reasonably than wait to be fired, he mentioned, after which filed a religious discrimination lawsuit.
Groff says that underneath a 1977 Supreme Court case, Trans World Airlines v. Hardison, employers should not have to display a lot to end up an undue hardship and will deny religious lodging to workers once they impose “more than a de minimis cost” at the industry. The case was once 7-2 in choose of TWA with each liberals and conservatives in the bulk.
But Groff’s attorney Hiram Sasser of the First Liberty Institute says the Hardison case “sort of stacked the deck against employees and the common folk.” “They’ve got to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to try to win one of their cases, and, I mean, that’s not right,” he mentioned.
Groff needs the Supreme Court to say that employers will have to display “significant difficulty or expense” if they would like to reject a religious lodging.
Biden management attorneys representing the Post Office say Hardison must be clarified to shed light on it offers considerable coverage for religious observance. But the management additionally says that once accommodating the religious practices of 1 worker negatively affects different workers, that may be an undue hardship on a industry.
Groff would appear to have the higher hand. Three present justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — have mentioned the court docket must rethink Hardison. And in contemporary years the court docket’s conservative majority has been in particular sympathetic to the troubles of religious plaintiffs.
Last yr, as an example, the court docket sided with any other one in every of First Liberty’s shoppers, a soccer trainer at a public highschool who sought after to be in a position to kneel and pray at the box after video games.
Groff, for his phase, has discovered different paintings since leaving the Post Office. These days, he is necessarily the postmaster for a retirement neighborhood with a number of thousand citizens. He oversees a personnel of volunteer citizens that types mail and places it in mailboxes on a daily basis excluding Sunday.
There are not any Sunday deliveries to Groff’s house both. He says he went in and disabled them on Amazon.
“I can wait for that stuff,” he mentioned. “And if I need it that bad, I’ll go to the store and get it.”
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