Employers are beginning to pay a hefty price for not considering extending an employee's leave of absence as a reasonable accommodation under the law. Just recently, Interstate Distributor Company, a national trucking company settled a nationwide class disability discrimination lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) for $4.85 million. In the lawsuit, the EEOC challenged Interstate’s practice of automatically terminating employees who needed more than 12 weeks of leave without considering whether the additional leave might be a reasonable accommodation. In addition, the EEOC challenged Interstate’s “no restrictions policy”, in which Interstate did not allow employees to return to work who had any restrictions and failed to determine whether there were reasonable accommodations that could be made to allow them to return to work. The Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) requires that employers who are covered by the law provide reasonable accommodations to disabled employees unless the employer can show that it would be an undue hardship to make the accommodation. Examples of likely accommodations are the requirement that an employer provide an ergonomic chair to an employee who has returned to work after carpal tunnel surgery and is not fully recovered, or, the ability to leave work early to continue to receive cancer treatments. What is significant about this particular settlement is the implicit recognition that the 12 weeks of leave guaranteed to many employees under the Family Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”) may not be enough and that employers must at least consider providing employees who are disabled with additional leave time. In addition, if an employee takes a leave to heal whether it be emotionally or physically, an employer must at least consider how it can allow that employee to return to work even if the employee returns with some restriction. What this settlement also makes clear is that continued enforcement of the law is necessary, where years after the passage of the ADA and other Civil Rights legislation, Interstate’s policies unfairly treated disabled employees differently than non-disabled employees.
