United Airlines faces mass lawsuit over vaccine accommodation policy

United's original plan was to place every exempted worker on unpaid leave – indefinitely – until the pandemic sufficiently wound down. For non-customer-facing employees, such as mechanics and ramp agents, the airline eventually changed course, allowing them to keep working under a masking and testing requirement. But for customer-facing employees – pilots, flight attendants, and others in roles that brought them into regular contact with the public – the policy held firm. More than 2,200 employees in total were placed on unpaid leave starting in November 2021. They were given the opportunity to apply for alternative non-customer-facing positions within the company, but they could not remain in their existing roles.

Those employees argued that United never seriously considered whether a less drastic option might have worked. Why, they asked, were non-customer-facing workers permitted to mask and test their way through the pandemic while customer-facing employees were sent home without pay?

The appeals court did not answer that question – that is for a jury to decide. But it did say the question is worth asking on behalf of the religious accommodation seekers within that group, all at once, rather than one employee at a time. The court certified a class made up of customer-facing employees who received religious exemptions and were placed on unpaid leave. Employees who had sought medical accommodations were not included, as the court found their claims required a more individualized review.

That distinction matters enormously. When a workplace policy affects a large group of employees in the same way, a class action allows them to pool their claims into a single lawsuit rather than file separately. For United, that means one trial could potentially determine its liability to the entire group at once. The exposure – covering lost wages, additional damages, and possibly punitive damages – is significant.

The court was also pointed in its reading of what the law actually requires of employers. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a company that receives a religious accommodation request cannot simply offer its preferred solution and move on. It must actively work through all available alternatives. Only after doing so, and concluding that each option would impose a substantial burden on the overall business, can it turn a request down. In this case, United had already demonstrated that masking and testing was workable for one segment of its workforce. That made it considerably harder to argue the same approach would have been unworkable for another.

For HR professionals, that is perhaps the single most important takeaway from this ruling. A company's own accommodation decisions in one part of the business can be used against it in another. If a policy works for some employees, the bar for claiming it would have failed for others is high.