EEOC sues Menzies Aviation over Sabbath worker forced to resign

The EEOC says Theoc was upfront about her Sabbath observance during the interview process. Her application materials, the filing states, identified her as a Seventh-day Adventist who needed time off from Friday evenings through Saturdays and described potential alternative scheduling accommodations. Menzies hired her in October 2023. 

Shortly after she began work, the complaint alleges, Menzies began scheduling her on Friday evenings and Saturdays. Theoc raised it with her immediate supervisor, the operations manager, and the general manager. Nothing changed, according to the filing. In late November 2023, she escalated to human resources. HR told her the accommodation would not be granted, the EEOC says. 

Then came the warnings. According to the complaint, Theoc was told that continued Sabbath-related absences could result in disciplinary action. She was forced to resign in early December 2023, the filing states, because staying employed would have meant violating her sincerely held religious beliefs. 

The EEOC alleges Menzies never engaged in the interactive process – the back-and-forth employers are expected to run through to explore reasonable accommodations – to identify a workable arrangement for Theoc’s Sabbath. That gap is doing a lot of work in this filing. The agency frames the absence of any interactive process as central to all three counts: failure to accommodate, retaliation, and constructive discharge. 

For HR leaders, the case lands squarely in familiar Title VII territory. The EEOC’s complaint reads like a checklist of the facts HR teams need to manage carefully: a Sabbath-observant worker, a conflict flagged at hire, requests routed through frontline managers and then HR, and no record of an interactive process.