Dive Brief:
- Decorative Paint, Inc., a small Ohio plant specializing in automotive painting, must return to court over a former employee’s allegations that it failed to reasonably accommodate her breathing difficulties and reassign her to a job with limited exposure to paint fumes, the 6th U.S. Court of Appeals held Sept. 3 (Root v. Decorative Paint, Inc.).
- The employee, who suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, worked as a production assistant, according to court records. When DPI called her back to work following the COVID lockdown, it assigned her to an area close to the painting oven and fumes; by the end of her 10-hour shift, she had trouble breathing, court records said. She later gave DPI a doctor’s note recommending that she not work around paint fumes.
- The HR director and the production manager allegedly told the employee she was a liability and sent her home. After she was terminated a few days later, she sued DPI for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act and Ohio law. The 6th Circuit reversed a judgment for DPI and reinstated the case. It found that a trial was necessary to resolve factual disputes regarding whether DPI properly responded to the employee’s request for an accommodation.
Dive Insight:
The ADA prohibits discrimination against a “qualified individual” based on their disability, and discrimination includes not granting them a reasonable accommodation absent undue hardship, the 6th Circuit noted.
In a fact sheet on the ADA, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission explains that a qualified employee with a disability “is an individual who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the job in question.”
Important for employers, the first step in determining whether an employee can perform the job’s essential functions is to undertake “an individualized inquiry” into their actual medical condition and evaluate what impact, if any, the condition might have on their ability to do the job, the 6th Circuit said.
Here, however, the parties disputed whether DPI ever undertook this inquiry. On one hand, the employee contended that the HR director and the production manager summarily concluded, based on the doctor’s note, that her breathing difficulties prevented her from working as a production assistant.
She also alleged she was never given a medical form or that DPI otherwise sought to clarify her limitations and instead shut down all further discussion by calling her a liability.
On the other hand, the HR director testified that she contacted the employee a few days later to follow up about obtaining more information, although the employee countered with phone records that seemingly undermined the HR director’s account, the 6th Circuit pointed out.
Also, while the parties didn’t dispute that some exposure to paint fumes was an essential function of the job, they disagreed on the scope of the employee’s limitations and whether she could be reasonably accommodated, the panel found.
For instance, the employee asserted that she asked to be reassigned to work in the “Rework” department, where she had worked for more than three years without breathing difficulties, removing blemished parts from the production line and sanding them down to be repainted.
During this time, she also worked up to two hours without difficulty in areas that exposed her to more paint fumes, the 6th Circuit noted.
DPI disputed she made the request. According to the company, even if she did, it wasn’t reasonable because her duties included shifting to whatever position needed support, and the exigencies of the COVID pandemic required her to work in a different area than usual.
But the 6th Circuit said DPI’s reasoning was based on its “premature conclusion” the employee required a zero-exposure environment, and its failure to perform an individualized inquiry foreclosed this argument.
“Given that [the employee] had worked the entirety of her career in Rework before this instance, with no disabling effects on her breathing, reassigning her to that group to accommodate her disability could have permitted her to satisfy the production associate role,” the panel observed.