The unanimous decision interpreted a federal civil rights law to require employers to make substantial efforts to accommodate their workers’ religious practices.
The Supreme Court broadened protections on Thursday for religious workers in a case that involved a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service who refused to work on his Sabbath.
In a unanimous decision, the justices rejected a test that had long been used to determine what accommodations an employer must make for religious workers, but declined to rule on the merits of the case, sending it back to a lower court to consider under a new standard.
Writing for the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the case gave it the “first opportunity in nearly 50 years” to explain the nuances of how workplaces must adapt to religious requests by employees.
For an employer to deny an employee’s request or a religious accommodation, Justice Alito wrote, it “must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
The decision could affect countless workplaces and could require many employers to make substantial changes to accommodate religious workers.
In the past few years, the Supreme Court has ruled that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games, that state programs supporting private schools in Maine and Montana must include religious ones, that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could defy city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children and that the Trump administration could allow employers with religious objections to deny contraception coverage to female workers.
