Sabbath-observant worker flagged the conflict at hire. The EEOC says her employer ignored it
Federal regulators say Menzies Aviation refused to accommodate a Seventh-day Adventist worker and pushed her into resigning.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against Menzies Aviation (USA), Inc. on April 29, 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The agency says the company violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by denying a religious accommodation, retaliating against the employee, and constructively discharging her.
At the center of the case is Alicia Theoc, hired as a Cabin Service Agent at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. According to the complaint, Menzies provides aviation logistic services such as ground handling and cargo management at airports nationwide. Theoc is a practicing Seventh-day Adventist. Her beliefs require her to refrain from work from Friday sundown through Saturday sundown.
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.
It is also a reminder that an accommodation denial rarely stays a single claim. The EEOC is pursuing failure to accommodate, retaliation, and constructive discharge in one filing. It is asking the court for a permanent injunction, orders requiring Menzies to institute policies, practices, and programs providing equal employment opportunities for employees with sincerely held religious beliefs, back pay with pre-judgment interest and lost benefits, reinstatement or front pay, compensation for pecuniary losses including job search expenses, compensation for non-pecuniary losses including emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, loss of enjoyment of life, and humiliation, and punitive damages.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Menzies has not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled on the claims.
