Having spent my professional career in the ready-mixed concrete industry, working Sundays was extremely rare, but it wasn’t completely unheard of. There was one year in which a company doing some serious work at the Ford assembly plant in Norfolk, while the plant was closed from Christmas through New Year’s Day, wanted concrete every day during that period, including Christmas and New Year’s Day. Being the man who always got the strange work assignments, I was the first plant manager asked to do the work. And yes, despite being salaried, I was paid extra for the Christmas and New Year’s Day shifts.

‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing’? How a USPS worker’s fight over Sunday shifts could change your workplace.

Story by John Fritze, USA TODAY • Saturday, April 15, 2023 • 10:56 PM

Washington — Gerald Groff wanted to spend his Sundays at church. His employer, the U.S. Postal Service, wanted him delivering packages.

That simple dispute between an employee and his managers sparked one of the most significant religious cases to reach the Supreme Court in years – with the potential to shift the balance of power between employees and employers over weekend schedules, dress codes and how workers conduct themselves around colleagues.

Mr Groff, the article states further down, sought work with the USPS precisely because, as Vernon Dursley happily said in Harry Potter: The Sorcerer’s Stone, there’s “No post on Sundays.”

This one is a bit personal for us, because our younger daughter worked for the USPS in Versailles, Kentucky, as a temporary worker; she hadn’t gotten the actual civil service job yet. And yes, as she told me while I am writing this post, Sundays were required because the regular USPS workers refused to do them, but the Amazon contract required Sunday deliveries.

Now, why would USPS workers be working on Sundays? Because the Postal Service signed a contract to deliver packages for Amazon in 2013, and Amazon wanted packages delivered on Sundays. While USPS tried to give workers off at least one day a week, our daughter had to work 23 days straight for the Christmas rush in December if 2017.

The appeal raises a basic question with potentially sweeping consequences: How far must large employers go to accommodate the religious needs of their workers? For Groff, an Evangelical Christian who told his boss in 2017 that he wouldn’t cover Sunday shifts because of his faith, the answer became a personal and painful one.

“I lived under a cloud of thinking any day I could report to work…and then be told that I was terminated,” said Groff, a 45-year-old Pennsylvanian who resigned from the Postal Service in 2019. “Two years of just pretty much every day was tough.”

While his supervisors attempted to accommodate Mr Groff’s needs, they couldn’t always do so, and he wound up having missed 24 scheduled Sundays, and disciplinary actions against him started to mount.

For nearly five decades, similar disputes have been guided by a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allows employers to deny religious requests if they present more than a trivial cost. That standard, Groff’s attorneys say, means companies could decline to alter schedules to account for a sabbath or allow an employee’s religious dress in too many circumstances.

In practice, the government argues, the standard is often read by courts to require employers to accommodate such requests.

So, the feds are arguing that the standard does not need to be changed, because it is often read improperly, as requiring employers to do things which would have met Mr Groff’s religious needs. That’s one strange argument!

Groff is asking the Supreme Court to toss that standard. But his critics fear what the court’s conservative majority might come up with as a replacement. And they’re concerned that new standard could lead to workplace discrimination.

“There’s a huge can of worms that this opens up,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Letting people shift the cost of exercising their religion onto their co-workers in a way that harms their co-workers is the opposite of equality.”

Whenever you hear something from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, you can count on it: their message will be hostile to the free exercise of religion. Taking Rachel Laser’s statement at face value, one can easily make the argument that other accommodations, such as those for pregnant women, or for handicapped employees which require other employees to work harder or longer, would also be “the opposite of equality.” Would Miss Laser and Americans United state that a company could force a black employee to work on Martin Luther King Day, Juneteenth, or Kwanzaa, because not to do so could burden other employees?

The court will hear arguments in Groff v. DeJoy on Tuesday.

Actually, I expect a narrower ruling, because Mr Groff, who was employed by the United States Postal Service, was being required to work for Amazon as well. More, it will depend on what he was told during his pre-employment interview. Was he told about Sunday deliveries for Amazon, and, if he was, was he told that the USPS would work around his religious faith? Did Mr Groff inform the USPS prior to being hired that he could not work on Sundays?

I’m old enough to remember Sunday “Blue Laws,” or Sunday closing laws, which kept many businesses closed. Things which were deemed essential, such as grocery stores and pharmacies and, of course, hospitals, were exempted. Ira P Robbins argued, in 2022, that Sunday closing laws, while held constitutional by the Supreme Court in McGowan v Maryland, 366 U.S. 420 (1961), they have effectively become obsolete, as exceptions to closing laws increased, some states repealed them, and the public wanted to shop on Sundays. Since McGowan turned on the states wanting to provide a day of rest as a societal good independent of religion, with so much of the public declining to take Sunday as anything other than go, go, go, that argument would fail today.

But perhaps it shouldn’t fail. Does Amazon really need to have things delivered on Sunday, and do people really need to have a Kitchen Aid stand mixer or a bird feeder or a new pair of shoes on Sunday? Did we not find out, during the COVID-19 panicdemic, that certain businesses were not only non-essential on Sundays, but for the rest of the week as well?

I thought that the blue laws were kind of silly when I was a teenager. Now, maybe not so much; we can use a day to slow down.