Gardner-Ihrig’s difficulties resulted from her religious conviction, as a Seventh-day Adventist, not to work on the Sabbath, the period of time from sunset on Friday night to sunset on Saturday night. During this time she refused to work. Because her initial position was part-time flexible (PTF), Sabbath wasn’t an issue at first. But Gardner-Ihrig wanted and needed to work full-time. “Everybody wants to be a regular,” she says. “Then you know how many hours a day you’re going to work and when your days off will be. You don’t know that as a PTF.”
A position opened up that she was qualified to bid on, but Gardner-Ihrig wasn’t able to do that because the position would have required her to work on Sabbath. As she lacked the seniority to request the coveted weekend time off, she was prevented from making the bid. Not long after this opportunity she was called into the office and told to sign papers terminating her employment because she refused to work on the Sabbath.
“They told me there was no alternative but to sign the papers and terminate,” Gardner-Ihrig says. “I did it under duress. They made me feel like I had to. And I didn’t have enough knowledge to know.” So for almost two years Gardner-Ihrig worked for another company, starting over at half the salary.
Gardner-Ihrig sought assistance from the Public Affairs and Religious Liberty department of the Seventh-day Adventist world headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. “The church attorneys and the Postal Service were able to come up with an agreement,” says Amireh Al-Haddad, assistant director of public affairs and religious liberty for the Southern Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. “Barbara would be accommodated as a PTF employee in the central Florida postal region, without having to go to full-time and bid on her shifts.” It seemed a good solution. “As far as we know, that was the first time a postal facility agreed not to force an employee to go into the labor union,” remembers Al-Haddad.
In 1988, Gardner-Ihrig was reinstated as a PTF. The labor union assured her that regular work would follow just as soon as there was a position open to accommodate her religious convictions. But instead of things progressing smoothly, Gardner-Ihrig was approached five times by management in an attempt to force her into a regular position that would require her to work during Sabbath hours. With the labor union’s help she was able to decline each time.
Mercifully, in 1990 a position opened up that she could “back into.” Backing into the position meant that she didn’t have to bid on it; the Postal Service just put her into it. The position didn’t require Sabbath work. Gardner-Ihrig gladly accepted, and her employment proceeded without further difficulties until 1996, when the Post Office began to implement system automation. As a result, her position was eliminated. Her supervisor arbitrarily rescheduled everybody. Gardner-Ihrig had seniority, and she should have been able to bid on her days off. Though they had the ability to do it, supervisors did not give her the option of having Sabbath off. The assignment she received required her to work a Friday night shift insted (part of the 24-hour Sabbath).
When that happened she approached her supervisor and explained the problem. The supervisor said she’d have to work. So for at least six months Gardner-Ihrig put in a request every week to receive Friday off. It was subsequently denied, and she was scheduled on Friday. So every Friday night she called to say she would not be in.
“In comparison,” says Al-Haddad, “they granted requests for people of other religious faiths. A Jehovah’s Witness and a Baptist were both granted requests for a change in schedule for Sundays. Barbara’s requests were denied. The labor union would sign off on it; the supervisor would refuse. She was stuck in a situation in which every week she was faced with the possibility of being fired.”
Gardner-Ihrig was harassed by her supervisor and began accumulating “absent without leave” occurrences on her employment record for each no-show Friday night. In addition, she was not paid for the time she did not work, effectively cutting her pay.
“We went through the very slow process of filing a complaint against the Post Office,” says Al-Haddad. “It took two years from the time we first filed the grievance to the time we came up for an administrative hearing. In the hearing we sat before an administrative judge for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We requested the hearing to try to obtain the Sabbath accommodation. In the hearing, we faced Barbara’s openly hostile supervisor. The regional senior labor relations specialist threatened that if Gardner-Ihrig missed another Sabbath it would be cause for termination. Witnesses we called basically lied. The supervisor was allowed to sit in with all the witnesses who were employed under her, and she glared at them the whole time. The result was that we lost.”
Though the hearing did not have a positive outcome for Gardner-Ihrig, she did receive a respite of sorts. “In reality, the supervisor could have just given her Friday/ Saturday off,” says Al-Haddad. “There were maybe two other people who had that day off. In our opinion, as we reviewed the record, that would not have created an undue hardship on the Postal Service. Instead, what the supervisor decided to do, after we lost the hearing, was to create further problems by splitting her days off.” Gardner-Ihrig continued to recesive letters of warning and verbal threats of termination.
“Even after we lost the administrative hearing we continued to look for ways for her to get accommodated,” says Al-Haddad. “Then in 1999, two years after we lost the administrative hearing, the supervisor who had arbitrarily changed her schedule was removed from the postal facility. When that happened we saw an overall change in attitude, though not an immediate change in schedule.”
A new supervisor arrived, and things began to look up. Gardner-Ihrig was told that her request not to be scheduled during the Sabbath would be accommodated if she would work only an occasional Sabbath.
“They kept insisting that I work on Sabbath,” Gardner-Ihrig says. “They said, ‘Just once a month and we’ll work something out the other Sabbaths.’ I said, ‘I can’t do it even once a month. That’s compromise. You don’t compromise what you believe. You either do it or you don’t.’”
Meanwhile, the religious liberty staff at the Southern Union Conference discovered something helpful. “We found a federal office management policy that reaffirmed her ability to get Sabbaths off,” says Al-Haddad. “We presented that to the Post Office, to her new supervisor, again asking for Sabbath accommodation. It was as easy to give her Sabbaths off as it was to take Sabbath away. It was up to the supervisor.” In September 1999 Gardner-Ihrig was called into her supervisor’s office and given a letter. It promised that she would have no Friday night or Saturday work, and that all the negative warning memos and attendance reports would be removed from her permanent record.
Since then things have been going along fine, though Gardner-Ihrig says she doesn’t feel they will ever be fully resolved. “With continued automation I will probably have another bout if I am there long enough,” she says. But at least now she knows what to do. “I’ll do exactly the same things I’ve been doing.”
Religious liberty is a slippery animal. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states, “The term ‘religion’ includes all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief, unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate to an employee’s or prospective employee’s religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer’s business.” Exactly what that means, however, is open to interpretation. But it’s worth standing up and fighting for.
“You can’t compromise,” says Gardner-Ihrig softly. “You must hold fast. To do that you must have a good relationship with God, because He’s going to be the only one there for you at times.”
Adriel Morton is a freelance journalist writing from near Albany, New York.
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