Dive Brief:
- Osmose Utilities Services, a provider of infrastructure services and products to utility companies, allegedly failed to accommodate an employee by letting her work remotely after she had a stroke, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed in a Sept. 16 lawsuit (EEOC v. Osmose Utilities Services, Inc.).
- The employee’s job involved responding to customer inquiries, including calling in or electronically entering tickets for services, according to the complaint. Following her stroke, she asked to work full time from home because she couldn’t drive and the office lights exacerbated her stroke-related headaches, the EEOC claimed.
- Management allegedly denied the request, as well as her request to work from home on the two to three days a week she had medical appointments. Per the complaint, Osmose granted her leave to attend them but fired her after her supervisor questioned her absences and pressured her to end the appointments. The EEOC sued Osmose for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by denying the worker a reasonable accommodation and retaliating against her.
Dive Insight:
Remote work has been around since before the COVID-19 lockdown, when necessity and improved technology opened the door for more employers to accept the arrangement.
Recently, with many businesses requiring employees to return to the office full time, employer attitudes may have changed — but their obligation under the ADA to consider remote work as a reasonable accommodation for an employee with a disability has not.
Then and now, the fundamentals are the same. Absent undue hardship, an employer must provide a reasonable accommodation to a “qualified individual with a disability,” according to EEOC guidance.
Key to most remote work accommodation claims: A person with a disability who is unable to perform the job’s essential functions, with or without reasonable accommodation, is not a “qualified individual” under the ADA, the guidance notes.
Typically, in such claims, the case turns on whether the job’s essential functions must be performed on site.
That’s why a former truck dispatcher for a national carrier company lost her claim. After she was diagnosed with PTSD, the company temporarily allowed her to work part time and partly from home, although it eventually fired her.
In November 2023, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the company’s favor, finding that full-time and in-person work were essential functions of the employee’s job, which she could not perform.
Similarly, in February, the 4th Circuit rejected the claim of a former Frito-Lay safety compliance manager that she should have been able to work from home during the height of COVID because she had an immunity-comprising condition, law firm Poyner Spruill explained in a post.
The manager made sure employees and the company complied with OSHA and other federal safety regulations, as well as Frito Lay’s rules, the post said. The 4th Circuit found that by her own testimony, “at the time of her request for remote work, her essential job duties required her presence onsite.”
By contrast, in 2018, the 6th Circuit held that 10 weeks’ remote work was likely a reasonable accommodation for an in-house attorney placed on “modified bed rest” following surgery. The court acknowledged that her job description required her to take depositions and represent the employer in court. But her eight years there, she had never done either, and she had successfully worked remotely before, it said.
In the most recent case, the employee also worked remotely before, when she and others in her department had to work from home for a few months while their office was being relocated, EEOC said.
In EEOC v. Osmose Utilities Services, Inc., the employee had a stroke after her office returned to in-person work, causing vision impairments, memory loss and headaches. The lawsuit alleged that as a “One Call Locator,” she was able to perform the essential functions of her job with the reasonable accommodations she requested, and Osmose did not articulate any undue hardship they would pose.