The lawsuits involve Arkansas-based Hank’s Furniture, a four-state home furnishings retailer, and Cleveland-based physical care provider United Health Services, Inc. (United States). Each company denied an exemption to one of its workers and then fired him for failing to comply with the company’s dismissal mandate.
Title VII requires employers to create “reasonable” hotels for workers, unless such hotels cause “undue hardship” to the employer. The EEOC alleges, in those cases, that corporations may have exempted their workers without “undue hardship. “
The EEOC is a federal firm created under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to investigate court cases of discrimination in office and enforce civil rights legislation designed to prevent discriminatory practices, adding religious discrimination. Court decision 9-0 in Groff v. Dejoy issued last June. The High Court struck down a precedent that allowed corporations to easily invoke “undue hardship” to the business and refuse religious accommodations, but employers will now have to demonstrate the burden of the “significantly higher costs” that granting accommodations would entail for their businesses.
In the EEOC lawsuit against United, a remote worker who worked entirely from home and had no tasks that required on-site or face-to-face interaction was denied a religious exemption, even though an accommodation would not have burdened the corporate. In the opposite case against Hank’s Furniture, the EEOC alleges that it denied verbal and written requests for accommodation from an assistant store manager when the company could simply have revered them without “undue hardship. “
For any of the employees, the EEOC involves compensatory and punitive damages, lost wages, and a permanent injunction to prevent those violations from happening again in the future.
According to the EEOC’s website, the firm won 13,814 court cases in fiscal year 2022 from staff alleging unlawful discrimination, a sharp increase from 2,111 last year.
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