Labor & Employment Developments Blog

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) is poised to elevate its focus on religious discrimination in the workplace and employers should be alert. With its newly restored quorum allowing Acting Chair Andrea Lucas to move forward with more aggressive enforcement, the agency is expected to pursue a broader litigation agenda emphasizing religious accommodation rights under Title VII. In 2025 alone, the EEOC filed 11 religious discrimination suits, the highest in nearly a decade. Lucas credited the agency’s “tremendous wins” in defending religious ...

On March 10, 2025, Justice Clarence Thomas issued a dissent following the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari for Ronald Hittle v. City of Stockton, California, 604 U.S.  ___ (2025), a religious discrimination case involving a fire chief terminated after attending a leadership conference at a church. In his dissent, Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, questioned whether it is time for the Court to revisit the longstanding McDonnell Douglas framework used in employment discrimination cases. 

In Groff v. DeJoy, decided today, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified the standard for employers to determine what constitutes an undue burden that would permit an employer to reject an employee’s request for a religious accommodation. Under Title VII, employers are required to reasonably accommodate an employee’s religious observance or practice if it is possible to do so without “undue hardship” on the conduct of the employer’s business. Until today, the seminal case on Title VII religious accommodations was the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Trans World Airlines Inc., v. Hardison. That case established the well-known standard that an employer is not obligated to grant a religious accommodation if the accommodation would create more than a “de minimis” burden on the employer’s operations. 

In this new podcast episode, recent cases and news from the world of Labor & Employment Law will be discussed, including:

Religious Accommodations:  Does an employer have to accommodate an employee who cannot work on Sundays and what constitutes an undue hardship. The Third Circuit considered these issues in Groff v. DeJoy.

Berling v. Gravity Diagnostics: In this recent Kentucky case, a jury awarded an employee over $450,000 when his employer ignored his request that it forego giving him a birthday party due to the employee’s panic disorder and later terminated his employment.

When I think of Abercrombie & Fitch, which is an infrequent occurrence, I think of soft core porn catalogues and over-priced t-shirts; now, I can add religious discrimination to the list.  The Supreme Court ruled this week against Abercrombie & Fitch for refusing to hire a young Muslim because she wore a hijab, which violated the store’s “look policy” for salespersons. 

The recently released 2012 EEOC enforcement statistics indicated an overall decrease in charges and increase in damages paid by employers.  Notably, for the second consecutive year, the EEOC reduced its pending inventory of private sector charges by 10% from fiscal year 2011, bringing inventory to 70,312.  However, the EEOC obtained the largest amount of monetary recovery in 2012, totaling $365.4 million.  Leading the states in originating charges was Texas at 9.0% of charges filed nationally, followed by Florida (8.0%) and California (7.4%).