One of your employees is injured on the job and receives a 100 percent total permanent disability rating in a workers’ compensation proceeding. If he asks to return to work, can you turn him away without running afoul of California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA)?
What if you have a policy or practice of allowing disabled employees to work light-duty assignments? The California Court of Appeal answered these critical questions in a recent case, which Cathleen Yonahara breaks down for us. Yonahara is an attorney at Freeland Cooper & Foreman LLP in San Francisco.
Disabled Employee Returned to Work, Then Sent Home
Rory Cuiellette, a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer, was injured on the job and received a 100 percent disability rating in connection with his workers’ comp claim.
Following disability leave, he asked to return to work in the fugitive warrants unit. His treating physician provided a note authorizing him to perform “permanent light duty— administrative work only.”
The city of Los Angeles allowed Cuiellette to return to work on May 27, 2003, on the “court” or “renditions” desk in the fugitive warrants unit, which was an administrative assignment.
However, Cambridge Associates, the city’s workers’ comp claims administrator, believed the city couldn’t reemploy someone who received a 100 percent disability rating for workers’ comp purposes. The city deferred to Cambridge’s advice.
On June 3, Cuiellette’s supervisor, Captain Lindsay, notified him that the city wouldn’t allow him to continue to work because he was “100 percent disabled.” He ultimately filed suit against the city for disability discrimination.
Case History
The case came before the California Court of Appeal—three times.
In the first appeal, the court held that Cuiellette wasn’t precluded from proceeding on his FEHA disability discrimination claim based on a position taken in a prior workers’ comp proceeding and that the 100 percent total permanent disability rating he received in that proceeding wasn’t necessarily a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason for the adverse action.
The city appealed again following a $1.57 million jury verdict in Cuiellette’s favor. The appellate court held that the trial court erred in failing to instruct the jury that Cuiellette had to prove that he was able to perform the essential duties of a police officer with or without a reasonable accommodation.
Since the city’s second appeal addressed only the issue of liability rather than damages, the retrial was limited to that issue. Before the retrial, Cuiellette filed an amended complaint and added a claim for failure to accommodate.
In the third appeal, the city argued that the trial court’s findings that it was liable for disability discrimination and failure to accommodate weren’t supported by substantial evidence because Cuiellette wasn’t able to perform the essential duties of a police officer with or without reasonable accommodation, even if he was able to perform the essential duties of the administrative court desk position.
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Light Duty Available
The essential functions of a police officer include many strenuous tasks, such as making arrests, taking suspects into custody, operating vehicles in emergency situations, and undergoing training exercises that simulate those duties.
The trial court found there was persuasive evidence that the city maintained “permanent ‘light duty’ vacancies in the drug testing and fugitive warrants units for the specific purpose of accommodating disabled officers who wanted to continue to work” but couldn’t perform the strenuous tasks of a peace officer position.
In accordance with that policy, the city placed Cuiellette in an administrative position in the fugitive warrants unit. He was able to perform the essential functions of that position from May 27 to June 3, 2003.
The trial court found that the city failed to accommodate Cuiellette and discriminated against him on the basis of his disability. The court stated, “In addition to considering Cambridge’s advice regarding workers’ compensation issues, the City should have independently evaluated [his] situation with reference to FEHA.”
If the city was concerned about Cuiellette’s physical limitations, “it had an affirmative duty to engage in an interactive process and to make an effort to accommodate [him], rather than simply take him off the job.”
Tomorrow, we’ll look at an employer’s duties under the FEHA as well as the court’s final ruling in this case.
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Like so many employment issues, it seems like the best practice is “When in doubt, engage in the interactive discussion.”
Like so many employment issues, it seems like the best practice is “When in doubt, engage in the interactive discussion.”