Groff v. DeJoy in Action – Jury Finds That Employee’s COVID-19 Religious Accommodation Request Would Cause Undue Hardship
Kathryn Bennett, Law Clerk
After a two-day trial on the merits of Robert Varkonyi’s claim that his employer failed to accommodate his request for a religious exemption from the company’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement, a jury returned a verdict finding that undue hardship would result to the employer if the request were granted. This case presents an interesting application of the new undue hardship standard articulated by the Supreme Court in Groff v. DeJoy, as applicable to religious accommodations under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Background
Last summer, in Groff v. DeJoy,[1] the United States Supreme Court upended decades of precedent discussing the standard applicable to employers when accommodating employees with religious conflicts to workplace rules under Title VII. Generally speaking, employers are required to accommodate employees whose sincerely held religious beliefs conflict with the employers’ policies or workplace rules, unless granting the request would cause the employer an undue hardship. Previously, an employer could demonstrate undue hardship if the burden to accommodate the employee imposed more than a de minimis cost on the employer. The Supreme Court via the Groff decision revised the “undue hardship” standard, and held that in order to demonstrate undue hardship, an employer must show that accommodating an employee’s sincerely held religious beliefs would cause substantial increases in costs, in relation to the particular conduct of the employer.[2]
However, while the Court generally defined the revised undue hardship standard under Title VII, it affirmatively left the context-specific application of its standard to the lower courts to further refine.
Varkonyi v. United Launch Alliance, LLC - Application of the Groff Undue Hardship Standard
A recent decision out of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California—Varkonyi v. United Launch Alliance, LLC—presents an example of the lower courts’ application of the new Groff undue hardship standard, which ultimately resulted in a jury’s finding that the employer was able to satisfy the undue hardship test. There, the plaintiff worked for United Launch Alliance (“ULA”) as a quality technical leader at its Vandenburg Space Force Base in California. In 2021, the company announced a policy that all employees were required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 prior to October 1, 2021, or else face termination by November 1, 2021. Mr. Varkonyi objected to receiving the vaccine on religious grounds due to his religious opposition to abortion and his belief that the COVID-19 vaccines were developed with aborted fetal tissues. ULA denied Mr. Varkonyi’s requested exemption from the vaccine requirement based on the undue hardship that it would face if it allowed him to continue to work unvaccinated, and subsequently terminated Mr. Varkonyi after he continued to refuse vaccination.
In its motion for summary judgment, and in furtherance of its undue hardship arguments, ULA presented evidence that the cost of obtaining and providing weekly COVID-19 tests for all unvaccinated employees was between $25,000-$35,000 a week. ULA also noted that prior to Mr. Varkonyi’s lawsuit, fourteen ULA employees were hospitalized and three had died from the virus.
The court denied ULA’s motion for summary judgment and allowed the claim to proceed to trial, finding that none of the evidence presented at summary judgment demonstrated the actual cost to ULA under Groff. In particular, the court pointed out that ULA’s estimates of $25,000-$35,000 weekly testing cost was premised on testing all employees as it had done prior to 2021, and did not correlate to the cost of testing only accommodated employees like Mr. Varkonyi. Additionally, the court noted that ULA had provided weekly testing to employees who were exempted from vaccination for medical reasons, further undercutting ULA’s undue hardship arguments.
At trial, however, the jurors ultimately sided with ULA and found that accommodating Mr. Varkonyi and allowing him to continue to work unvaccinated would have posed an undue hardship on the company, which at least implies that the jurors agreed that ULA’s evidence of the financial costs associated with weekly testing for unvaccinated employees was compelling evidence of “substantial cost” under Groff.
Employer Considerations
While lower courts are still grappling with the parameters of the Supreme Court’s decision in Groff, the Varkonyi case suggests that financial burdens associated with religious accommodations are still viable considerations for employers when considering whether to deny religious accommodation requests because of undue hardship. While an employer may be expected to bear some costs in making accommodations for its employees under Groff, the Varkonyi decision shows that these costs are not unlimited, and that financial burdens associated with religious accommodations remain compelling evidence of undue hardship. Campbell Litigation remains available to assist employers with questions regarding religious accommodations and other employer obligations under Title VII and state law.
[1]600 U.S. 447 (2023).
[2]See https://www.rockymountainemployersblog.com/blog/2023/7/6/supreme-court-revises-the-undue-hardship-standard-for-religious-accommodations-under-title-vii for further discussion of the Groff v. DeJoy decision.