Since 1977, employers evaluating whether an employee’s religious accommodation request would cause undue hardship on their business had a low burden to meet. A denial of a religious accommodation could likely be justified if the proposed accommodation involved more than de minimis cost or inconvenience to the employer.
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court changed that by “clarifying” the religious accommodation standard under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ruling that to justify the denial of a religious accommodation, an employer must show “substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business.”
