380 - Supreme Court Upholds Employee’s Right to Religious Accommodation

In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the right of an employee to be granted a religious accommodation by his employer unless doing so would substantially affect the employer’s business.

In Groff v. DeJoy, the high court reiterated that employees must not be forced to choose between their faith and their job, and finally clarified long-standing precedent that had been largely misunderstood and used to deny religious accommodations to employees for years.

The petitioner in the case, Gerald Groff, had asked the justices to determine whether his employer, the U.S. Postal Service, was required to provide a religious accommodation excusing him from work so that he could observe the Sabbath on Sundays.