Best-Practices Leadership: Team management tips and fun team-building activities to boost team performance, collaboration and morale

Must you give Sunday off for "Church TV" reasons?

By Mindy Chapman, Esq., Mindy Chapman & Associates
5/1/2008 - 4:00pm
Discrimination & Harassment

Mindy Chapman, Esq., Mindy Chapman & Associates

Mindy is a nationally recognized authority in EEO laws and is a contributing editor to the HR Specialist: Employment Law monthly newsletter. She is highly regarded for her workplace compliance training that “clicks and sticks,” because it is practical and memorable. She is also the coauthor of the American Bar Association’s bestseller and authority on civil rights training, “Case Dismissed! Taking Your Harassment Prevention Training to Trial."

The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) has recognized Mindy as one of its Top Ten Speakers nationally. She has trained extensively in all industries at all levels of the workforce—from boardroom executives to managers and supervisors and to hourly employees in union and non-union environments.

View all articles by Mindy Chapman, Esq., Mindy Chapman & Associates

If employees ask for Sunday off work for religious reasons, must they attend services on that day? A new court ruling clarifies that the answer is no. And you could face a religious discrimination lawsuit even if you try to accommodate employees by allowing them to find their own replacement for Sunday shifts ...

Case In Point: Kimberly Bloom, a cashier at an Aldi grocery store in Pennsylvania, asked for Sundays off work for religious reasons. Aldi’s shift rotation system required Bloom to work only one Sunday every two months. It also provided a voluntary shift-swap system so employees could trade days with co-workers who could work Sundays.

Bloom told her boss that her religious convictions as a Christian prohibited her from working Sundays or from asking her co-workers to work in her place. The company offered to let her come in later so she could attend church services, but she said she didn’t go to church. Instead, she read the Bible, watched TV services at home and spent time with family.

When Bloom failed to show up to work on two Sundays, the store fired her. She filed a Title VII religious discrimination claim with the EEOC, which backed her lawsuit. On its web site, the EEOC says employers must “reasonably accommodate employees’ sincerely held religious practices unless doing so would impose an undue hardship on the employer.”

In court, Aldi lawyers argued that the company’s voluntary shift rotation policy was a “reasonable accommodation.” And it said that working on Sundays was an “essential job function” for cashiers and that if Bloom were exempt, it would cause undue hardship.

The grocery store also claimed that since Bloom didn’t go to church, her desire not to work the Sunday shifts was personal, not religious. (EEOC v. Aldi Inc., 3/28/08).

How did this case end…and what lessons can be learned?

The court sided with Bloom, saying that, “Church attendance or membership in a particular sect is not necessary to assert a Title VII claim.”

The court also ruled that the company’s shift-swapping policy was not a reasonable accommodation in this case because, “Bloom, a Protestant, has established that she sincerely believes that it is a sin to work on the Sabbath or to ‘support’ another person working on Sundays. Hence, her decision not to attend church on the Sabbath is immaterial as to whether her beliefs qualify as religious for purposes of Title VII.”

3 Lessons Learned … Without Going To Court

1. Train managers on EEO laws or open yourself punitive damages. The court ruled that Bloom can seek punitive damages due to Aldi’s lack of management training regarding religious bias. Such a training failure could support a finding the company acted with “reckless disregard” of the employee’s federal rights.

2. Your policy is not automatically a resonable accommodation. The court said that rather than invoking a pre-existing policy, employers must respond with a good-faith effort to accommodate the person’s religious need, “as opposed to merely relying on a system or policy." Talk to the employee. Even more importantly, listen to the employee.

3. Religion is protected. Argue all you want, but here is a great example of courts supporting employees who seek reasonable accommodations for religious reasons—even if those reasons don’t conform to traditional notions of religion. Employers who fail to review such requests on a case-by-case basis will need more than a prayer for relief.

Tags: discrimination, discrimination law, discrimination laws, employees, management, management training, reasonable accommodation, religious discrimination

Best-Practices Leadership: Team management tips and fun team-building activities to boost team performance, collaboration and morale