Dive Brief:
- A magistrate judge for a Georgia district court on Tuesday recommended several claims be trimmed from a 2024 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disability lawsuit filed against an infrastructure support services company (EEOC v. Osmose Utilities Services, Inc.).
- While Judge John Larkins III found EEOC provided sufficient evidence to move forward on one failure-to-accommodate claim, he determined it did not sufficiently argue disparate treatment and retaliation. Larkins also threw out a second failure-to-accommodate claim.
- The case is notable given EEOC’s limited resources demand it selects a small minority of complaints to move to litigation; in its 2024 fiscal year, for example, EEOC received 88,531 new charges of discrimination but filed only 110 employment bias lawsuits.
Dive Insight:
In a September 2024 complaint, EEOC alleged Osmose Utilities Services failed to accommodate an employee by letting her work remotely after she had a stroke. The stroke affected her eyesight and her ability to drive and the office lights exacerbated her headaches, EEOC said.
The worker experienced the stroke in July 2019, several months after she started working for Osmose as a one call locator, in which role she responded to customer inquiries and electronically entered tickets for pole reinforcing and inspection. She took 12 weeks of Family and Medical Leave Act leave and in August, reached out to request to work remotely upon her return in September. She was denied, per court documents.
Throughout September and October, she left the office frequently for physical therapy appointments, according to the judge’s opinion. In September, she asked a second time to work remotely and was again turned down. Osmose fired her on Oct. 24, six weeks after her return from FMLA leave.
After conciliation efforts failed, EEOC filed suit and both parties moved for summary judgment.
In his 100-page analysis, Larkins only held for EEOC on one charge, finding the agency can move forward with its second failure-to-accommodate claim. In that situation, the plaintiff had explained she was scared to drive due to the vision issues resulting from her stroke, according to court documents.
In the first instance of requesting to work remotely, however, the worker merely “testified that she asked [her supervisor] if she could work remotely, and [the worker] admitted that she did not provide any basis for her request.” Because she neither identified a disability nor explained how an accommodation would help her overcome the limitations presented by it, she did not meet her burden in requesting a reasonable accommodation, the judge found.
The judge also determined EEOC and the worker could not move forward with disparate treatment or retaliation claims. While one superior who helped manage the worker knew of her disability, the worker did not tell the supervisor who ultimately fired her, the judge noted. And while it is possible the superior told the supervisor about the disability, “a plaintiff cannot withstand summary judgment through conjecture about what the decisionmaker might have been told.”
It is also not clear the supervisor knew the worker engaged in protected activity, the judge said, as the first remote-work request was not clearly a request for reasonable accommodation and he allegedly did not know about the second request. And while the worker requested a daily checklist for her role from her superior — an email on which the supervisor was copied and which the worker requested due to disability-related memory issues — the email did not reference her disability, the judge said.
While remote work is not always a ‘reasonable’ accommodation, an attorney recently wrote for HR Dive, determining whether it must be allowed depends heavily on each individual situation’s facts. Employers should always take care and consult counsel before denying an accommodation, she said.
The judge in EEOC v. Osmose found that because both parties agreed the second request was denied and the superior “did not further engage [the worker] about accommodating her vision and driving problems,” EEOC and the plaintiff have “created at least a material issue of fact about whether Defendant failed to accommodate her disability or was otherwise responsible for the breakdown in the interactive process.”
A district court judge generally considers a magistrate judge's opinion and makes a final ruling on the parties' motions after allowing each to file objections.
