Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Kevin Duden worked for the Washington Department of Corrections at a high-security prison. He objected on religious grounds to the department’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement and proposed alternatives including remote work, masking, testing, and social distancing. The department denied an accommodation and Duden brought claims under Title VII and the Washington Law Against Discrimination.
The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants. It concluded that Duden’s proposed accommodations would impose an undue hardship because a substantial part of his job required in-person instruction of aggression-replacement classes for incarcerated students and because the department faced significant workplace health and safety concerns. Duden appealed.
The Court’s Holding
A divided Ninth Circuit panel affirmed. Applying Groff v. DeJoy, the majority held that undue hardship is evaluated in the overall context of the employer’s operations and is not limited to direct financial expense. Approximately 30 percent of Duden’s work involved in-person instruction in prison classrooms where students practiced social skills through role-playing. The associated administrative duties were also tied to that instruction. Allowing Duden to work remotely would have required the department to hire or reassign another employee to perform a substantial portion of his job.
The majority also credited evidence that masking, testing, and distancing had not prevented rising staff infection rates before the mandate and that four employees died after workplace exposure. The department had received roughly 600 religious-exemption requests, increasing the operational significance of any accommodation policy. Because health, safety, and operational burdens can satisfy the Groff standard, the absence of a dollar-cost calculation did not preclude summary judgment. The court declined to consider a new argument about vaccination policies for inmates, vendors, and visitors because Duden raised it only in his reply brief.
Judge Tung dissented. He read Groff to require concrete evidence that an accommodation would produce substantial increased costs in relation to the employer’s operations. In his view, the department offered generalized assertions rather than data about remote work, alternative staffing, or other possible accommodations, and therefore had not carried its summary-judgment burden.
Key Takeaways
- Under the majority’s approach, Title VII undue hardship may rest on health, safety, and operational burdens even without a detailed financial-cost calculation.
- An employee’s proposed remote-work accommodation is weaker when important job functions require direct, in-person interaction in a secure facility.
- The number of similar accommodation requests can be relevant to the practical burden on the employer’s overall operations.
- Employees should develop and preserve evidence about comparable workplace policies and proposed alternatives in the trial court and opening appellate brief.
- The dissent highlights an unresolved practical tension over how much concrete cost evidence Groff requires at summary judgment.
Why It Matters
California employers and employees litigating religious-accommodation claims in the Ninth Circuit should build a fact-specific record addressing each proposed accommodation, its operational consequences, and available alternatives. Employers should not rely on labels such as “essential function” alone; employees should identify workable alternatives and counter the employer’s evidence before summary judgment.
This memorandum disposition is unpublished and generally nonprecedential under Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3. It nevertheless shows how a Ninth Circuit panel applied Groff to a safety-sensitive workplace and, through Judge Tung’s dissent, where future disputes over proof of undue hardship are likely to focus.