He said some courts have applied a “de minimis” test, which asserts that anything more than a minor inconvenience could be considered an “undue hardship.” He urged the court to adopt a more rigorous standard.
“We believe the best plain text meaning of ‘undue hardship’ is ‘significant difficulty or expense,’” Streett told the justices.
To demonstrate that an accommodation is an undue hardship, Streett said the employer should need to provide “actual evidence in the record that goes beyond [a loss of] morale” that shows a “concrete effect on the operations of the business,” such as evidence that workers have become so overburdened that they cannot do their jobs or serve customers.
“It certainly can’t be what we have here,” Streett added, “where the post office had an accommodation that was working and just abandoned it.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar, who represented the postal service, argued that the current “case law [already] provides meaningful protections for religious rights.” She argued that “it’s just incorrect to say that there is not a substantial amount of accommodation happening and that courts are just reflexively denying these claims.”
“[Groff’s] absences created [a] direct concrete burden on other carriers who had to stay on their shifts longer to get the mail delivered,” Prelogar said. “That caused problems with the timely delivery of mail and it actually produced employee retention problems with one carrier quitting and another carrier transferring and another carrier filing a union grievance. That is an undue hardship under any reasonable standard.”
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