reasonable accommodation

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The recent Tenth Circuit decision in Hwang v. Kansas State University upholding the employer’s inflexible leave policy causes one to ponder the logic of leave as an accommodation under the ADA in a broader sense. When contemplating such issue, the “oxymoronic anomaly” relating to this issue comes to the fore. Just what is this anomaly?…

Reports of the demise of inflexible leave policies—leave policies that result in termination if the employee is unable to return to work after a fixed amount of leave – are premature.

The EEOC has sued numerous employers, alleging that their “inflexible leave policies” were unlawful because they did not take into account the possibility of…

This, my fourth and last post about the Sixth Circuit’s decision in EEOC v. Ford Motor Company (6th Cir. April 22,2014), deals with the adage, variously attributed to Oscar Wilde, Clare Booth Luce and a host of others, that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

Recall the plaintiff in this case, Harris, a resale buyer, had…

In its 2005 guidance on working at home, or telecommuting, as a reasonable accommodation, the EEOC said that “[m]any employers have discovered the benefits of allowing employees to work at home through telework…programs.” I suspect as many requests to work at home are met with quiet groans by employers as by the excitement of discovering…

Dance professionals would never confuse the “one-step” with the “two-step” and neither should employers when it comes to evaluating the reasonableness of a requested accommodation. The two-step analysis comes from the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett. The one-step analysis, much less favorable to employers, continues to be advanced by the…

To add structure to the often amorphous process of obtaining and evaluating requests for accommodations, employers seeking compliance, efficiency and consistency have developed forms to assist their efforts. In an EEOC Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) “informal discussion letter” replete with cautions for those employers, the OLC said: “The wide range of disabilities,…