Quest Diagnostics Settles EEOC Religious Discrimination Suit

DALLAS – Quest Diagnostics will pay $90,000 and furnish other relief to settle a religious discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency announced today.

According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, the employee, a phlebotomist, was a practicing Seventh-day Adventist who began working for Quest Diagnostics in Dallas in 2008 and was working at a Quest facility in Rockwall at the time she was fired in 2019. The phlebot­omist’s religious beliefs prevent her from working on her Sabbath, which is sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. Quest honored her request for religious accommodation not to work on her Sabbath for the first nine years of her employment. But in her 10th year, the company told her it would no longer accommodate her religious beliefs by exempting her from working the Saturday schedule. The phlebotomist was fired after she failed to work on her scheduled Saturday shifts.

The EEOC charged that the defendant violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on religion and requires employers to reasonably accommodate an emp­loyee's sincerely held religious beliefs unless doing so would pose an undue hardship to the employer. The EEOC filed suit, Civil Action No. 3:20-cv-02939, in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

The three-year consent decree settling the suit, entered by U.S. District Judge Ada E. Brown on Feb. 4, prohibits future religious discrimination against applicants and employees whose religious beliefs prohibit working on their Sabbath. In addition to the monetary relief, the decree requires Quest Diagnostics to adopt and distribute a religious accommodation policy, create a protocol for use by its Employee Relations department for use in considering requests for religious accommodation, and provide annual training to employees of the territory where the former phlebotomist worked.

“This case demonstrates the importance of assessing the particular facts of an applicant’s or employee’s request for religious accommodation to determine whether the accommodation would create an undue hardship for a business’ operations,” said Meaghan Kuelbs, senior trial attorney in the EEOC’s Dallas District Office. “We are pleased that the resolution of this case includes measures that will help inform Quest Diagnostic’s workforce of its rights under Title VII as to the reasonable accommodation of religious beliefs.”

EEOC Regional Attorney Robert Canino added, “When an employer is considering undue hardship to its business, unexpected changes to scheduling accommodations that a long-tenured emp­loyee has come to rely on may result in a personal and professional hardship to the employee. These matters merit close consideration with an eye toward preserving those important employment relation­ships.”

For more information on religious discrimination, please visit https://www.eeoc.gov/religious-discrimination.

Quest Diagnostic, based in Secaucus, New Jersey, is an American medical diagnostic company. A Fortune 500 company, Quest operates in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Brazil. Quest also maintains collaborative agreements with various hospitals and clinics across the globe. As of 2020, the company had approximately 48,000 employees, and generated more than $7.7 billion in revenue in 2019. The company offers access to diagnostic testing services for cancer, cardiovascular disease, in­fectious disease, neurological disorders, COVID-19 and employment and court-ordered drug testing.

The EEOC advances opportunity in the workplace by enforcing federal laws prohibiting employ­ment discrimination. More information is available at www.eeoc.gov. Stay connected with the latest EEOC news by subscribing to our email updates.