U.S. Supreme Court rules Wisconsin law makes Catholic Charities exempt from unemployment system

Yahoo

a day ago

Unemployment benefits application (photo by Getty Images)
This is a developing story and will be updated.
In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Catholic Charities organization in Wisconsin doesn't have to take part in the Wisconsin unemployment insurance (UI) system.
The ruling overturns a 4-3 Wisconsin Supreme Court decision issued in March 2024 that declared the work of Catholic Charities Bureau Inc. of the Superior Diocese of the Catholic Church doesn't get a pass from Wisconsin's UI law on religious grounds.
The Wisconsin ruling, written by Justice Anne Walsh Bradley, declared that the Catholic Charities work is 'secular in nature' and that the agency and its subsidiary organizations that took part in the case 'are not operated primarily for religious purposes' as defined in the UI law's religious exemption.
In Thursday's ruling, Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote for the Court that arguments the Wisconsin high court majority made amounted to making preferences of one religious denomination over another.
Her ruling noted that the church offers its own unemployment compensation program for laid-off workers and dismissed the suggestion that the organizations were 'more likely to leave their employees without unemployment benefits.'
The Wisconsin ruling held that the agencies' work was not religious in nature because they didn't attempt to preach the Catholic faith to participants and did not serve only Catholics.
'Petitioners' Catholic faith, however, bars them from satisfying those criteria,' Sotomayor wrote. The ruling quoted from the dissent by Justice Rebecca Bradley in the Wisconsin decision.
'Wisconsin's exemption,' Sotomayor wrote, 'as interpreted by its Supreme Court, thus grants a denominational preference by explicitly differentiating between religions based on theological practices. Indeed, petitioners' eligibility for the exemption ultimately turns on inherently religious choices (namely, whether to proselytize or serve only co-religionists).'
The Wisconsin UI law exempts all churches, church conventions or church associations 'without differentiating between employees actually involved in religious works' and those who are not, Sotomayor wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, while joining in the unanimous opinion, wrote a separate concurrence stating that because the Wisconsin ruling did not defer to the Bishop of Superior's assertion that Catholic Charities and its affiliates are 'an arm of the Diocese, the Wisconsin Supreme Court violated the church autonomy doctrine.'
In a separate concurrence Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson signaled how states could ensure that nonprofit employees of religiously associated organizations are covered by UI — by focusing on the work involved rather than its underlying motivations to determine who is and who is not exempt.
When the federal law was revised in 1970 to include nonprofit employees in state UI programs, Congress exempted certain church-affiliated employees. The goal, Jackson wrote, was to avoid the state getting involved in a dispute 'over the sufficiency of a fired employee's prayers or the accuracy of their scriptural teaching.'
The intent of Congress was to exempt 'a narrow category of church-affiliated entities' that could produce such an entanglement 'precisely because their work involves preparing individuals for religious life,' Jackson wrote.
She concluded: 'It is perfectly consistent with the opinion the Court hands down today for States to align their [federally-based] religious-purposes exemptions with Congress's true focus.'
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