Lancaster Online had a more in depth story about Mr. Groff versus the USPS. I posted the content of the article beings there is a paywall.
In federal district court in 2019, Gerald Groff explained why, as a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier in Holtwood, he had refused to show up for work 24 times and ultimately resigned his position.
“Very simply, I believe that the Lord’s day, or Sundays, is meant to be a day of rest, and that it’s unique and holy, a day set aside to worship the Lord, and it’s supposed to be a day of rest where we abstain from work,” Groff said.
Groff sued the Postal Service for scheduling him to work Sundays. He lost, appealed and lost again.
But the U.S. Supreme Court, now controlled dations. Legal experts warn it also could cause unfair power imbalances among employees.
Groff, who grew up in Lancaster County and lives in Providence Township, has pro bono representation from several law firms aligned with efforts to expand the role of churches in public life, among other issues.
In arguing Groff’s case, these lawyers want the court to reexamine a 45-year-old ruling that said employers should meet a person’s religious needs only if it doesn’t cause the company an “undue hardship.”
They want the court to reinterpret what that means. A ruling for Groff could drastically reshape workplaces by giving religious workers more power to seek accommodations by an assertive 6-3 conservative majority, decided in January to review the case, with a hearing set for Tuesday. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision on the case by the end of June.
Scholars and advocates say a court ruling expanding the rights of religious workers could force a greater portion of the national workforce to defer to conservative Christian stances on issues including birth control, marriage and abortion. They say the ruling could lead to workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people, who have been targeted by the same law firms that represent Groff.
Groff declined requests for an interview, and his lawyers would not answer some questions about his life and background. Public records and interviews Groff granted to conservative outlets provide glimpses of a spottily employed, somewhat solitary man dedicated to his faith.
The missionary
Groff, 45, is unmarried. He grew up in Holtwood, in southern Lancaster County, where his family descended from Mennonites who settled in the region in the 1700s.
“I grew up in a Christian family, and I have a picture at home of myself standing with my hand on a globe I made in kindergarten, and it said, ‘Someday, I want to be a missionary,’ ” Groff said in a video interview produced by his legal team. “And so my life has been about figuring out how God would like to use me.”
He went to Mennonite schools, and he graduated from Millersville University in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in biology.
From there, Groff followed an atypical path for someone with a science degree. He worked as a volunteer for the college’s English Language Institute for two years, earning only a stipend, according to federal legal filings.
He worked two roughly 16-month stints at Sight & Sound Ministries, the performing arts institution that aims to share Christian teachings through the plays and musicals it stages. From 2004-07, he didn’t work at all, court filings show.
Gaps may be accounted for by volunteer work and missionary service. For example, from August 2007 to March 2008, Groff volunteered with the Dove School of Global Transformation, an international network of evangelical churches that was founded in Lancaster County.
Groff said he went to Africa after high school and served there two more times. He said he also did mission work in Nepal and other parts of Asia, “just going wherever God wanted to put me.”
He’d been unemployed for over a year when he took a part-time mail carrier job at the Quarryville post office in November 2010. He resigned after 11 months, then returned to the job six months later.
“When you’re on the mission field, you have to come back and start over when your term is finished, and sometimes you just have to take the job that comes along,” he said in the interview produced by his attorneys. “For me, when God opened that door, I was willing to go there. I didn’t know what I was in for.”
Groff’s court saga began after the Postal Service began delivering packages for online retailer Amazon, said Chrissy Miller, the assistant district representative for the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, a labor union.
Quarryville mail carriers began delivering for Amazon in 2015. By then Groff was a “rural carrier associate,” a noncareer employee scheduled on an as-needed basis. Like his colleagues, Groff was expected to work occasional Sunday shifts under the new agreement with Amazon.
In May 2016, the union representing Groff and his colleagues set up an arrangement with the Postal Service on how to handle this, Miller said. Rural mail carriers could volunteer to work a Sunday shift. When not enough people volunteered, there was a rotation to make sure they “are assigned their fair workload and take their fair rotational turns working on Sundays,” she said.
Legal documents show Groff worked out a deal with the Quarryville postmaster to be exempt from working Sundays. But later, the postmaster told Groff she could no longer do that.
Groff transferred from Quarryville to Holtwood to avoid the Sunday work requirement, but in 2017, Holtwood was also tasked with delivering Amazon packages.
In a deposition, Holtwood Postmaster Brian Hess described mounting frustration at the small post office, where nearly every employee was a churchgoing Christian who, like Groff, preferred not to work Sundays.
Mail carriers were allowed to complete their Sunday shifts after church. But for Groff, who said he believes Sundays must be reserved for honoring God, that compromise wasn’t enough.