Ninth Circuit Clarifies Employers’ Obligation to Accommodate Religious Objections to Vaccines
The recent hantavirus outbreak linked to an international cruise ship has once again put infectious disease risk, and mandates aimed at mitigating that risk, in the public spotlight. While health officials emphasize that the risk to the general public remains extremely low, the outbreak has triggered a familiar legal question: how far must an employer go to accommodate workers’ religious beliefs and practices with respect to public health measures?
The Ninth Circuit recently addressed that question in Williams v. Legacy Health.
In Williams, a group of healthcare employees sought religious exemptions from their employer’s mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy. Their positions required close, regular contact with patients and staff, and the employer denied their requests. The employees were placed on leave and ultimately terminated. They sued under Title VII, arguing that the employer failed to accommodate their religious beliefs.
The Ninth Circuit disagreed, providing the first significant guidance about employers’ duty to provide religious accommodations since the Supreme Court in Groff v. DeJoy ruled that an employer must accommodate an employee’s religious practice except when that accommodation would cause an undue hardship – that is, a burden, cost or adversity that is excessive or unjustifiable. Stated differently to comply with federal law, an employer denying a religious accommodation must show that the burden of granting an accommodation would result in “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
Applying the ruling in Groff, the Ninth Circuit emphasized that the costs to be considered are not limited to financial costs but also can include operational burdens and health-and-safety concerns. The court further explained that what constitutes an “undue” burden must be determined in the context of the particular employer at issue. In the healthcare setting at issue in Williams, the significant risks that unvaccinated employees would become ill, causing staffing shortages, and that those employees would infect other staff and patients threatened a substantial burden on the employer’s business of providing health care services. Finally, the court noted that harm from a possible accommodation need not have occurred to provide a basis for an employer to refuse the accommodation, as long as the risk of undue hardship is “realistic and not merely conceivable or hypothetical.”
Employers faced with a request for a religious accommodation should carefully consider the costs that could be created by the requested accommodation in relation to their specific business and workplace. The analysis should also focus both on the likelihood and the extent of the potential harm that would occur or that could realistically occur.
