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By Le Figaro with AFP

Published on 04/18/2023 at 1:33 p.m.

The very conservative Supreme Court of the United States examines Tuesday the file of a Christian factor who refuses to work on Sunday, and could take advantage of it to enlarge the place of religion in the professional sphere. The high court, very sensitive to religious freedoms since its reshuffle by Donald Trump, will hear the arguments of the parties for an hour and will have to render its decision before June 30.

Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian, started working for the postal services in 2012. Following a contract between the Post Office and Amazon, his sorting center had to open on Sundays to process parcels from the giant of the distribution. Putting forward his religious convictions, he had asked for arrangements so as not to work on the 7th day of the week. His employer had tried to satisfy him, in particular by transferring him to a smaller centre.

But, in 2017, it had also started distributing Amazon parcels. His employer had tried to find colleagues to ensure his Sunday offices, but had not always succeeded and Gerald Groff had ended up being sanctioned for abandoning his post.

In 2019, he resigned and filed a complaint for religious discrimination. After losing at first instance and on appeal, he turned to the Supreme Court. By agreeing to take up the case – even though it rejects 80% of the appeals addressed to it – the High Court has hinted that it was not satisfied with the previous judgments.

“minimum cost”

According to experts, it could take advantage of this debate to review its case law on religion at work. A federal law of 1964, amended in 1972, prohibits religious discrimination in the professional sphere and obliges employers to seek accommodations to satisfy the beliefs of their employees, as long as it does not representan undue burdenfor their operations. In 1977, in a judgment concerning an employee of an airline company who did not want to work on Saturdays, the Supreme Court had held that the arrangements provided for by law should not “inflict more than minimal costto employers.

The judgment was strongly criticized by defenders of religious freedoms, for whom the bar is too low. In fact, he “allows businesses to avoid accommodations in most cases“, notes the professor of right Joshua McDaniel on the site of the Harvard university. Denouncing a “flagrant error with serious consequences“, the former postman asked the court, in an argument transmitted before the hearing, to “correct his misdeeds».