Dive Brief:
- A plant manager at a facility in Northville, Michigan, can move forward with his Family and Medical Leave Act retaliation claim because the company, CW Manufacturing, could not explain why it terminated him but not a similarly situated worker, a U.S. district court judge for the Eastern District of Michigan determined Monday.
- The company argued the plant manager, who had taken several separate weeks of FMLA leave over the previous year for surgeries and related issues, was terminated as part of a planned reduction in force. But it could not explain why an operations manager, who performed a substantially similar role, was retained instead, the judge said.
- Comparators — similarly situated colleagues whose experience can be compared to a plaintiff’s — can make or break many types of employment lawsuits, including those involving FMLA.
Dive Insight:
According to the lawsuit, the plant manager requested medical-related leave, including for three separate surgeries and one infection, four times from October 2022 to November 2023. While he used paid time off for most of the leave, he was granted FMLA leave for his final request, after exhausting his PTO.
In the fall of 2023, the company’s global president invited a consultant on-site to “identify inefficiencies.” The consultant identified the plant manager and operations manager roles as redundant and suggested letting one go, according to the opinion, although he denied selecting the plaintiff as the one to terminate.
“In FMLA retaliation cases involving a RIF, the company must specify some objective reason for terminating the plaintiff when there are other similarly situated candidates who survived the reduction,” the judge noted. In Meadows v. CW Manufacturing, she said, there was no such reason — there was no record of objective criteria used to assess the plaintiff and nothing to indicate he had poor performance.
The judge also noted the temporal proximity of the termination to the worker’s return from FMLA leave, as well as his experience of feeling “alienated” upon his return.
In addition, “a jury could question whether there was a RIF at all,” the judge said, as the worker was let go 10 months before all others who were separated in a RIF, and “at least one higher up at the company did not know there was a RIF and thought [the plaintiff] left ‘voluntarily.’”
CW Manufacturing declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Using the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework in the context of FMLA, courts carefully assess whether the plaintiff can provide evidence of pretext for an adverse action. In a still-ongoing court case involving a hotel worker who was alleged she was fired for taking leave for gender-affirming surgeries, the worker argued that while she was told her role and those of other assistant general managers were being cut as part of a restructuring, her role was ultimately the only one eliminated.