In a recent federal court case, McCormick v. Chicago Transit Authority, a former transit employee won a jury trial and $300,000 in damages (the maximum award permitted for the claims at issue) when he successfully argued that his employer's failure to grant him a religious exemption to its vaccine mandate was discrimination under Title VII.
The employee sought an exemption and accommodation based on his Catholic faith and his opposition to vaccines derived from aborted fetal cells. The employer denied the accommodation request and terminated him for failure to abide by its vaccine policy.
The McCormick case is an important reminder for employers to tread carefully with requests for religious accommodation in the workplace. This is especially crucial because the Trump administration has made religious freedom a priority, and the EEOC has recently taken aggressive enforcement action on religious discrimination cases. Additionally, recent legal developments have made it easier for employees to establish a sincerely-held religious belief and more difficult for employers to show an undue hardship in response to accommodation requests.
Religious Discrimination Claims 101
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees for their religious practices unless the accommodation would cause an undue hardship. To establish a claim for failure to accommodate, an employee must show (1) a religious observance or practice (2) that is based on a sincerely held religious belief, (3) conflicted with an employment requirement, and (4) the religious observance or practice was the basis or a motivating factor for the employee's termination or other discriminatory treatment.
Challenges for Employers in Handling Religious Accommodation Requests
Employers may decline to provide a religious accommodation when the employee does not have a sincerely-held religious belief that justifies the accommodation—but this has become increasingly difficult to do and, if not handled properly, could result in legal liability. In McCormick, the employer tried to attack the employee's sincerity with evidence that he had strong political and secular reasons to oppose vaccines, including his distrust of medical institutions. The employer also argued that McCormick had taken other medications without questioning whether they were derived from aborted fetal cells.
Those arguments failed at summary judgment and at trial. Federal courts, including the Seventh Circuit, have ruled that an accommodation request may be plausibly based on religious beliefs even if the employee also invokes secular considerations. In other words, an employee's personal or political beliefs do not negate the religious nature of the request.
Employers may also decline to provide a religious accommodation when doing so would result in an undue hardship for the organization. But as we have previously reported, the Supreme Court has raised the standard for establishing an undue hardship, and employers must typically show that the accommodation would result in substantial increased costs.
Conclusion
Recent legal developments have made it harder for employers to deny employee requests for religious accommodations, and easier for an employee or former employee to assert religious discrimination claims in court. Employers should take care to train human resources personnel on Title VII compliance and to have adequate systems in place to process accommodation requests lawfully.
Human resources staff must understand both the obligation to engage with an employee requesting an accommodation, as well as the limits of the employer's obligations. For example, an employer is generally not required to provide the specific accommodation requested by the employee if another reasonable accommodation is feasible under the circumstances.
If your organization has any questions about handling religious accommodation requests or litigating Title VII claims, please contact the authors of this article or any member of Venable's Labor and Employment Group.