Dive Brief:
- A Michigan adult care organization failed to accommodate employees with disabilities who were unable to return to work after exhausting Family and Medical Leave Act leave, instead treating their inability to do so as voluntary resignation, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleged in a Sept. 13 lawsuit.
- Per the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, two employees of PACE Southeast Michigan had filed accommodation requests asking for an extension of unpaid leave prior to the expiration of their FMLA leave. PACE allegedly denied the requests, did not engage in an interactive process and terminated both employees.
- The employer’s conduct violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, EEOC alleged. The agency seeks injunctive and monetary relief for the two named employees as well as a class of similarly situated employees. PACE did not respond to a request for comment submitted via online form.
Dive Insight:
The FMLA provides covered employees up to 12 weeks of job-protected, unpaid leave over one 12-month period, including for serious health conditions that prevent them from working. But both EEOC and some federal courts have said that the exhaustion of FMLA leave does not necessarily preclude additional leave for employees with disabilities under the ADA.
For example, an EEOC technical assistance document notes that a qualified individual with a disability is entitled to more than 12 weeks of unpaid leave as a reasonable accommodation so long as this would not impose an undue hardship on the operation of the employer’s business. The employer may consider the impact of the initial 12 weeks of absence as well as any ADA-specific undue hardship factors in its analysis, according to EEOC.
In its Sept. 13 lawsuit, EEOC alleged that PACE automatically denied the two named employee’s extended leave requests. The agency also claimed in a press release that the employer did not rehire a replacement for either employee until both of them had already begun jobs with new employers.
“This employer easily could have granted these brief extensions of leave with no undue burden on the company,” Miles Uhlar, trial attorney at EEOC, said in the press release. “By refusing to do so, it violated the ADA.”
The agency reached a $65,000 settlement in 2022 with a trucking and property management company it similarly alleged had terminated two employees with disabilities who were unable to return to work following FMLA leave. EEOC claimed that the employees in that case had requested three weeks and one week, respectively, of extended FMLA leave.
Despite these lawsuits, federal courts have not necessarily signed off on all employee requests for leave extension in line with the ADA. In 2017, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that an employee who requested three months of medical leave in addition to the FMLA’s 12-month leave period was not a “qualified individual” for the purposes of the ADA, because a reasonable accommodation would not enable the employee to work. “An employee who needs long-term medical leave cannot work and thus is not a ‘qualified individual’ under the ADA,” the court reasoned.
Years later, the 5th Circuit sided with an employer in the case of a school registrar who exhausted the FMLA’s leave entitlement and could not provide a return-to-work date, similarly holding that the employee was not a qualified individual under the ADA.