Dive Brief:
- A flight attendant for Southwest Airlines filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging the airline discriminated against her based on disability in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (Patterson v. Southwest Airlines Co.).
- The worker alleged the airline refused to accommodate her severe allergy to cats and dogs and required her in those situations to request to switch with another flight attendant, go home without pay or endure the flight. Flight attendants were generally unwilling to switch, which resulted in “substantial revenue” lost when the worker went home or the worker became ill on occasions she stayed on board, the complaint said.
- Animals can introduce complicated accommodation issues for companies, particularly when multiple interests conflict, such as when the same pet that serves as an accommodation for one party causes a separate accommodation issue for another.
Dive Insight:
The flight attendant alleged that after the company adjusted its policy to allow cats and dogs on board in 2018, she wrote a letter to Southwest’s vice president of inflight operations requesting an accommodation due to her allergies, which “would subject her to severe illness if she had to work a part of the cabin in which a dog or cat was located.”
The VP allegedly responded three months later and “indicated that no accommodation could be made.”
Because the policy the airline mandated was not working, the flight attendant asked for any passenger with a cat or dog to be moved out of her section and into another section of the cabin, which the airline rejected. She also proposed that passengers with dogs be moved forward if seats were available, which the airline also rejected.
The flight attendant demanded a jury trial and asked the court to enjoin Southwest from similar unlawful employment practices, award compensatory and punitive damages and more.
Both Southwest and an attorney for the plaintiff did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The case highlights the difficulties employers sometimes face when it comes to the presence of animals in the workplace. In 2023, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a Michigan medical center in not accommodating a nursing student with a panic disorder who wanted to bring her service dog on-site. In that case, a patient and another worker at the facility began having allergic reactions to the dog, which posed a “direct threat,” the court said.
In contrast, SHRM recently lost a jury trial after a former job applicant sued because the organization would not allow her to bring a service dog on-site to manage her Type 1 diabetes. While SHRM claimed undue hardship in a court document, it did not mention other workers’ allergies.
