Who then changed the agreement from not even mentioning requiring fingerprinting to absolutely requiring it. That's the most egregious bad-faith example in this story.
If a business can arbitrarily declare "You now all need to pass background checks including fingerprinting to keep your jobs", what's to stop them saying "You now need to accept getting paid half of what we'd agreed to when you were employed"?
There was an employment agreement, the employer wished to add conditions to that after the agreement was reached between the two parties. And there apparent "re negotiation" of that agreement was the company saying "OK, you're fired". And the EEOC and the court both decided that was not OK. Which seems like the right outcome to me, regardless of whether the "religious discrimination" makes any sense or not. I'd totally expect the prosecution lawyers to play whatever the strongest argument the law had available to them. I would totally let a lawyer convince me it was appropriate to claim I have a christian belief and that part of that means I do not want to be fingerprinted, if that allowed them to use the most powerful legal argument against an employer who had arbitrarily and capriciously fired me on the spot for resisting being fingerprinted to keep the job I'd had to 16 months without that requirement.
In most of the US, for most US jobs, absolutely nothing. The vast majority of US workers are at-will employees. Their boss can call them up at any point and say “We’ve decided that starting next pay period, we’ll be cutting your salary in half. Have a great day!” The employee’s options are to accept that or start job hunting.
Here in Australia, we're a fair bit more heavily unionised than you are over there, which helps keep some of the power imbalance in the employers favour in check.
Not that unionisation is perfect though either. When I was growing up it was a regular thing for unions to wield their collective power in aggressively overreaching ways - it was common for transport unions and fuel industry unions to have extended strikes over pay claims right before christmas, tand truck drivers would stop delivering to stores, oil refineries would shut down resulting in fuel rationing, and dock workers would stand down resulting in queues full of container ships full of imported goods on the horizon at the beach in summer.
The reaction to a bad job is... you quit and find another one.
Granted, there are substantial power balances between the parties, which is why even the US adds some federal protections (can't fire or decide not to hire for certain protected reasons, wage and work hour limitations) and states can add more (most relevant to HN, California's ignoring non-compete agreements).
But this particular example just smacks of entitlement, when the government worker protection departments should probably be spending more time on chicken processing factories running 18 hour shifts around band saws and paying minimum wage.
Which is also an option in non At-Will Employment states.
This was his job. With his private sector employer. Who paid him money in exchange for services.
Someone being forced to resign because their work requirements are incompatible with their beliefs is part of having a moral code. You're not entitled to be able to work in a specific job.
Refusing to being tracked with an identifier, when you're working in a security sensitive job, is absolutely "an undue hardship" on your employer.
And the idea that alternative accommodations for a background check exist is bullshit. By definition, they all boil down to attesting to your identity + searching for a certain class of records against that identity.
(I'm all for creating equality by leveling the playing field for things outside of individual's control, but at some point, you're harming everyone else's equality by making bad-faith... faith claims)