Takeaway: Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) discrimination and retaliation claims following an employee’s termination are often complex and highly dependent on the specific facts of each case. Employers must be diligent in documenting all FMLA and ADA requests and any related communications, along with any employee performance or disciplinary issues. Employers should make the documentation available to a qualified employment law attorney defending against the charges.
Competing allegations over the reason an employee was fired by a medical research clinic raised genuine issues of disputed facts that resulted in some of the employee’s Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) claims going forward, a federal district court ruled. The court granted in part and denied in part the employer’s motion for summary judgment.
The employee was a supervisor of clinical trials at the research facility. In December 2019, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She requested and was approved for unpaid intermittent ADA leave for her medical appointments and treatment. In the summer of 2020, the employee was approved for eight weeks of FMLA leave to undergo a double mastectomy. However, the employee returned to work after only using six weeks of leave, saying that her supervisor had called and asked her to return to work early. She later said she felt pressured to return.
In October 2020, the employee again requested an ADA accommodation through the clinic’s third-party leave administrator to work from home for two months. The administrator forwarded the request to the clinic’s director, to whom the employee now reported, as a request to work from home for two consecutive months. The director informed the employee via email that the clinic could not accommodate two months of fully remote work and asked for a meeting to discuss her request. The employee responded and clarified that her request was only for intermittent leave as needed for her medical appointments and treatment. After the meeting, the director approved the employee’s request.
During the same month, one of the employee’s direct reports—a friend who had driven the employee to her appointments and treatments—contacted HR to complain that two months earlier, the employee had texted them inappropriate pictures of the employee’s nude chest and surgery scars, which the subordinate found offensive, saying the pictures made them uncomfortable. After an investigation, the clinic fired the employee on Oct. 30 for violating its anti-harassment policy, and she filed several claims alleging discrimination and retaliation under the ADA and the FMLA.
The clinic moved for the dismissal of five of the employee’s claims: 1) her ADA discrimination claim, 2) her ADA retaliation claim, 3) her ADA failure-to-accommodate claim, 4) her FMLA retaliation claim and 5) one of her FMLA interference claims. The district court ruled on the employer’s motion for summary judgment as follows:
1. ADA discrimination claim—motion denied. The court denied summary judgment for the employee’s ADA discrimination claim after finding genuine dispute over several material facts, casting doubt as to whether the clinic’s explanation for termination was pretext. First, although past practice in harassment investigations took into account the relationship of the parties, in this case, the HR investigator dismissed the friendship of the two employees as irrelevant, which might support the claim that the employer did not conduct a proper investigation. Next, the court noted that the director had made several statements regarding the clinic being under pressure due to COVID-19 research trials and already being short-staffed. Finally, the court pointed out the temporal proximity of the employee’s request for accommodation and her termination.
2. ADA retaliation claim—motion denied. Because the court had already found a genuine dispute of material fact over whether the stated reason for the employee’s termination—violation of the clinic’s anti-harassment policy—was a pretext for retaliation for the employee’s intermittent remote work request, the court also denied summary judgment for the ADA retaliation claim.
3. ADA failure-to-accommodate claim—motion granted. The employee claimed that the clinic failed to accommodate her request to work from home for two months. But the court pointed out that the employee did not dispute that she never requested two months of consecutive remote work. Instead, the employee clarified to the director that the request as transmitted by the third-party administrator was inaccurate—she had requested to work from home as needed to accommodate her cancer treatments. After a discussion between the employee and the employer, the employer agreed to the accommodation. The employee failed to show that her employer denied a reasonable accommodation she wanted.
4. FMLA retaliation claim—motion denied. Finding that the two and a half months between the summer FMLA leave and termination on Oct. 30 was sufficiently close in temporal proximity, combined with a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether the employer’s stated reason for termination was pretext for discrimination and retaliation, the court denied summary judgment for the employee’s FMLA retaliation claim.
5. FMLA interference claim—motion granted. Regarding the employee’s claim of FMLA interference because her supervisor called requesting her to return early from her approved FMLA leave, the court noted that giving employees the option to work while on leave does not constitute interference, unless they are coerced into working during the leave as a condition of continued employment or the employer threatens the employee with an adverse consequence for not complying with the request.
Because the employee did not present any evidence that the phone call included coercion to return to work early, the court found that summary judgment for the employer on the retaliation claim based on the supervisor’s call was in order.
Leggio v. Ochsner Clinic Foundation, E.D. La., No. 22-1232 (April 14, 2023), joint motion to dismiss claims granted (May 19, 2023).
Robert S. Teachout, SHRM-SCP, works in the Washington, D.C., area and is a legal editor for XpertHR, a service helping HR build successful and purposeful workplaces.