UAW wins religious accommodation lawsuit

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a very interesting ruling today in a lawsuit filed against the United Auto Workers over its alleged failure to provide reasonable accommodation for a union member’s sincerely held religious beliefs. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the union and the appeals court, in a closely divided decision with three separate written opinions (PDF), narrowly upheld that ruling.

The case comes from an AM General plant in Mishawaka, Ind. Plaintiff Jeffrey Reed began working at the plant, which has a union contract requiring all employees to either join the union or pay an agency fee equal to union dues. The contract does allow for employees with a genuine religious objection to joining or supporting a union to pay an amount equal to those dues to one of three charities designated by the union and the company.

After reading UAW publications, Reed concluded that he could not support the union for religious reasons. The union first decided to designate him as an “objecting non-member” and required him to pay the agency fee, minus the portion of that fee that would be used for political purposes. A few weeks later, after continued discussions and speaking to Reed’s paster, the UAW redesignated him as a “religious objector” and told him to donate the amount of his full union dues to a charity instead.

But because the religious objector status requires paying the full union dues to a charity, while the objecting non-member status allowed him to deduct that portion of the dues used for political purposes, the amount he paid to the charity was $100 higher than the amount the union repaid him for the dues he had paid since he started the job. Reed then filed suit, claiming that this disparity amounted to an unreasonable accommodation of his religious objections and amounted to being disciplined for his religious beliefs.

The district court granted summary judgment against Reed, concluding that he had not presented a prima facie case that he had faced “discharge or discipline” due to his religious beliefs and that the accommodation that the union had made for his religious beliefs was reasonable. The court noted that the UAW was not his employer and could not discharge or discipline him under the law. The appeals court upheld that ruling in a 2-1 split decision.

Judge Alice Batchelder wrote the majority opinion in the case, joined by Judge Guy, who wrote a separate concurring opinion emphasizing that even if Reed was able to make a prima facie case for having suffered adverse impact due to his religious beliefs, the accommodation that the UAW made for him was “reasonable and nondiscriminatory.”

Judge David McKeague filed a dissent in which he argued that Reed had suffered an “adverse employment action” due to the $100 disparity and arguing that this fact alone made the accommodation unreasonable. But as the majority opinion noted, the plaintiff had every right to argue his case based on a “disparate impact” standard and explicitly decided not to do so.

This may be a case where the plaintiff’s attorney failed to make the strongest argument on behalf of his client. Had he argued the case based on a disparate impact standard, he might well have convinced the court. But the court cannot create its own arguments on behalf of a party to the case.