New York City.
As Jay-Z and Alicia Keys sang, it’s the “concrete jungle where dreams are made of. There’s nothin’ you can’t do.”
That includes taking indefinite leave as a “reasonable” accommodation under the New York City Human Rights Law.
That’s right folks. It’s time for another edition of “Fact or Fiction” a/k/a “Quick Answers to Quick Questions” a/k/a QATQQ f/k/a “I don’t feel like writing a long blog post.”
Earlier this week, I spoke at the SHRM Lehigh Valley Annual Conference on leave issues under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act. During the course of our discussion, not only did we address the interplay between these federal laws, but we also touched upon the impact of workers’ compensation laws.
One question that came up is whether an employer can require that an employee take FMLA leave concurrently with workers’ compensation leave.
To receive the protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act, an individual with a disability must be qualified to perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation. Absent undue hardship, an employer must provide a reasonable accommodation.
So, you’d think that the ADA would require a link between a requested accommodation and an essential job function. Well, not so much according to this recent decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a case in which the Attorney General’s office refused to accommodate one of its attorneys who requested a parking spot close to the office.
Noting that the text of the ADA specifically contemplates “making existing facilities used by employees readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities,” without any indication that an accommodation must facilitate the essential functions of one’s position, the Fifth Circuit held that the ADA does not require a nexus between the requested accommodation and the essential functions of the position.
Readers: A brony is a male fan of the children’s television show My Little Pony.
(This is the part where you let everything that you’ve read thus far sink in, as you watch this clip, close your office door, and laugh hysterically. Go ahead. It’s ok).
According to Gawker, the brony posted to Reddit that his co-workers gave him a raft of crap for setting his office computer screensaver to Applejack, a My Little Pony character.
A little over a year ago, I wrote here about a steel worker named Kerry Woods. Unfortunately for Mr. Woods, he was on the receiving end of a constant barrage of “raw homophobic epithets and lewd gestures” from his supervisor. Notwithstanding, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a $500K jury award for Mr. Woods, holding that Mr. Woods’s same-sex sexual harassment claims failed because he failed to satisfy the Supreme Court’s test in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc..
Oncale was another same-sex harassment case involving employees at an oil rig. In Oncale, the high court held that a jury may infer that same-sex harassment occurred because of sex when the plaintiff can produce:
Let me tell you about a teacher in South Dakota. In 2010, she received a letter communicating concerns about her performance. Subsequent evaluations of the teacher’s classes noted several deficiencies. So, the school placed the teacher on a performance improvement plan.
It was right around this time that the teacher met with a physician’s assistant, who diagnosed the teacher with “anxiety and depression, likely stemming from her concerns about possibly getting fired.”
So, at the teacher’s request, the physician’s assistant wrote a letter to the school seeking a laundry list of accommodations, including:
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “What kind of person cares that much about going to a baseball game that he would risk losing his job over it?”
The guy who hasn’t missed a Yankees home game for 38 years.
According to this CBS2 New York Report, Joseph Neubauer, who hadn’t missed a Yankees home game since the 1970’s, was fired from his position because he didn’t want to mess up an attendance streak at Yankee Stadium.
Before I get into the this new bill, let’s clear up a popular misconception: David Hasselhoff lives in my basement rent-free right-to-work means that an employee can be fired at any time for any non-discriminatory reason. No, dudes. That’s called at-will employment.
Right-to-work laws give individual employees in a unionized workplace the right not to join or financially support the union. 24 states, plus Guam, have passed right-to-work laws. Absent a right-to-work law, all employees in a collective bargaining unit must join the union and pay union dues.
And Pennsylvania could be next.
Last week, I talked about reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the importance of having an open-minded, respectful conversation with a disabled employee who requests an accommodation to perform the essential functions of the job. Ultimately, as I’ve discussed before, the employer (and not the employee) may insist upon a particular accommodation as will enable the employee to perform the essential functions of his job.
But is that always the best move?
Consider this recent case, in which a diabetic service technician requested that his employer provide him with an air conditioned vehicle to keep his insulin cold. Providing an air conditioned vehicle seems pretty reasonable to me. Instead, however, the company had a policy, which allowed all employees “take breaks at restaurants or other establishments to cool off on hot days.” Thus, the company claimed that this policy would be a accommodation and; therefore, the employee should not have refused it.
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