September 24, 1996

CHURCH-STATE LAW ALERT!

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held that the California Department of Food and Agriculture violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when it refused to accommodate an employee whose religious beliefs precluded his working between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. (The September 19 opinion, Opuku-Boateng v. California (no. 94-16542), is published at 96 C.D.O.S. 7003.)

In 1982, Kwasi Opuku-Boateng, a Seventh-Day Adventist, received an appointment to permanent employment as a Plant Quarantine Inspector (i.e., a person who examines vehicles for quarantined agricultural products) at the border-inspection station in Yermo, California. Having made special arrangements during the job application process to sit for an examination on a Sunday instead of a Saturday, Mr. Opuku-Boateng assumed that his employer knew of his religiously-motivated unwillingness to work on Saturdays. Upon visiting the station before his first shift, he found that he had been scheduled for Saturday work. He informed his supervisor that his religious beliefs precluded him from working on Saturdays. After some weeks of negotiation, the Department informed Mr. Opuku-Boateng that the job appointment process would be terminated.

U.S. District Judge Milton L. Schwartz (E.D. Cal.) held after a trial that, although the plaintiff had established a prima facie case of discrimination, the Department had demonstrated that accommodating his religious beliefs would have caused undue hardship. (Title VII requires an employer "to make reasonable accommodations, short of undue hardship, for the religious practices of his employees and prospective employees." Trans World Airlines, Inc. v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63, 74 (1977).) The court stated that accommodating the plaintiff would require other employees to work more than their fair share of Friday night and Saturday shifts; result in substantial morale problems; and result in more requests for accommodations.

The Ninth Circuit reversed in a 2-to-1 decision. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for the majority, pointed out that employees at the Yermo station were required to work "an equal number of undesirable weekend, holiday, and night shifts," and there was no proof that the shift assignments could not have been arranged so that all the employees would have received an equal number of "undesirable" shifts. The court also criticized the Department for not preparing a tentative schedule, based on voluntary shift trades, which might have shown that such voluntary trades "would completely eliminate the hypothetical difficulty resulting from the need to accommodate Opuku-Boateng's religious beliefs." The court stated that, "at the very least," the Department should have accommodated the plaintiff temporarily so that, by the end of his probationary term, it could have determined "what actual hardships, if any, would result." Judge Reinhardt wrote that neither "hypothetical morale problems" nor "the mere possibility that there would be an unfulfillable number of additional requests for similar accommodations by others" could constitute undue hardship.

Judge Robert Boochever concurred in the majority opinion. U.S. Senior District Judge Samuel P. King, sitting on the Ninth Circuit by designation, filed a one-sentence dissent stating that he agreed with the trial judge.

© Martin Kassman 1996