IHOP to pay settlement to employee who was forced to work on Sundays

CNA Staff, Aug 7, 2024 / 18:08 pm

An IHOP restaurant in North Carolina will pay $40,000 to a former employee who was forced in 2021 to work on Sundays in violation of his religious beliefs. 

The settlement was announced Aug. 6 by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency tasked with enforcing federal laws prohibiting employment discrimination, which had filed a lawsuit on the employee’s behalf in 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina.

According to the lawsuit, the defendant was hired as a cook at an IHOP location in Charlotte in January 2021. 

“At the time of hire, the employee requested and was granted a religious accommodation of not working on Sundays to honor his religious observances,” the Aug. 6 announcement says. 

“After a change in management in April 2021, the new general manager expressed hostility toward the accommodation and required the employee to work on Sunday, April 25, and Sunday, May 9. After the employee told the general manager that due to his religious beliefs, he would no longer work on Sundays, the general manager fired him.”

The general manager was also alleged to have made comments to other employees such as “religion should not take precedence over [the employee’s] job” and that the employee supposedly “thinks it is more important to go to church than to pay his bills.”

Such conduct violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides for religious accommodations in the workplace and protects individuals from religious discrimination and retaliation, the EEOC noted.

Under the two-year consent decree resolving the lawsuit, Suncakes — the franchise owner of several dozen IHOP restaurants in the region — will pay $40,000 in monetary damages to the employee, provide annual training to managers on the provisions of Title VII, post a notice to employees about the settlement, and revise its current policies to expressly include protection for religious accommodations. 

The revised policy will be posted in all 17 IHOP locations operated by Suncakes in North Carolina, the announcement says. 

The ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina follows a unanimous June 2023 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of a Christian postal worker who says he was targeted and disciplined by his employer for refusing to work on Sundays because of his religious beliefs. In that ruling, the high court rejected an interpretation of federal law that has been used to deny employees’ religious accommodation requests if they present more than a “trivial cost” to the employer. 

Legal observers hailed that ruling as a “landmark decision” and “a win for the little guy,” while the U.S. Catholic bishops said the ruling “breathed life back into a major civil rights law meant to prevent discrimination by employers against people of faith in the workplace.”