by Jack Merrill
In the usual case, employers that receive reasonable accommodation requests from their employees try to help. They may adjust a work schedule, grant a leave of absence, or even modify job duties. Too often, however, those same employers fail to grasp the broad scope of their ongoing duties to accommodate. They reach what they perceive as an end point based on their own interpretations of what’s reasonable, then refuse to help workers further. Decisions like that have a high potential to lead them into hot legal waters.
A recent Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) decision illustrates this point. The employer involved believed it bent over backwards, as it were, to help its employee. It gave her 12 weeks of FMLA leave, 23 weeks of part-time work, job relocation, and adjustments to avoid heavy lifting. Despite the seeming generosity of these accommodations — a fact expressly noted by the MCAD in its decision — the employer was tripped up when it refused to extend part-time work for three additional weeks so its employee could complete physical therapy and, hopefully, return to full-time work. Because the employer could not demonstrate that the continued leave would impose an undue hardship, it violated the Massachusetts anti-discrimination statute. It was ordered to pay damages to its former employee despite the fact that she did not recover sufficiently to work full-time as hoped.
The lesson for employers here is patent. Reasonable accommodation is an ongoing and fungible process that requires regular reassessment of workplace requirements and employee needs. Granting a work adjustment is not alone enough to satisfy the law, which requires an interactive engagement with employees in search of accommodations that are reasonable and appropriate under given circumstances. Employers who fail to understand that process as they seek to themselves decide what’s reasonable and what is not run the risk of lawsuits. In most cases, those suits can be avoided by careful consideration of what the law requires.
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