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Accommodating the Non-Disabled Under California Disability Law

9/2/16

By: Lisa Gorman
In Castro-Ramirez v. Dependable Highway Express, Inc., Plaintiff’s son needed a kidney transplant and required daily home dialysis treatments. Plaintiff was the only person in his household who knew how to operate the dialysis machine. Plaintiff’s son often needed to begin his treatment by 7:00 p.m. For over three years, Dependable Highway Express (“DHE”) accommodated Plaintiff’s need to administer dialysis to his son by scheduling him for early shifts. Plaintiff’s supervisors likely never considered whether they were legally required to make this accommodation; they had an employee dealing with a challenging situation and they agreed to help. We call that human nature.
One day, a new supervisor took over. Despite having been told Plaintiff needed to leave work early to care for his disabled son, he changed Plaintiff’s schedule such that he was unable to leave in time to administer dialysis to his son. When asked for an explanation, the supervisor lied, citing to a customer complaint. To the contrary, after Plaintiff’s shift was changed, that customer emailed DHE asking that Plaintiff resume handling his early morning deliveries. The supervisor admitted he had seen the customer’s email. We call that an abuse of power.
Ultimately, the supervisor terminated Plaintiff for refusing to work a shift that would have precluded him from administering dialysis to his son. Plaintiff sued for disability discrimination.
A prima facie case of disability discrimination under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (“FEHA”) requires, among other things, a showing that the plaintiff suffered from a disability. “Adapting this framework to the associational discrimination context,” the Castro-Ramirez Court explained, “the ‘disability’ from which the plaintiff suffers is his or her association with a disabled person.” The Court held Plaintiff’s evidence gave rise to reasonable inferences of discriminatory motive and pretext, and, on that ground, denied DHE’s motion for summary judgment.
DHE argued this was fundamentally a reasonable accommodation claim, and the FEHA is clear that employers need not make accommodations for associates of the disabled. In its August 29, 2016 opinion, the Court of Appeals agreed the failure to accommodate claim was not on appeal. The Court observed, however, “no published California case has determined whether employers have a duty under FEHA to provide reasonable accommodations to an applicant or employee who is associated with a disabled person” and opined that, “read in conjunction with other relevant provisions, [the statute] may reasonably be interpreted to require accommodation based on the employee’s association with a . . . disabled person.” We call this a slippery slope.
Of course Plaintiff’s supervisor should have accommodated his need to get home early enough to administer his son’s dialysis. Anyone who would deny an employee that kind of accommodation for no good reason does not deserve to be in a position of authority. However, with this holding, California employers cannot terminate employees who have notified them of an associate’s disability without risk of a viable discrimination suit. And, based on the Court’s dicta, employers may soon be required to accommodate disabilities of third parties with whom their employees associate, regardless of the nature or severity of the disability.
We regularly advise clients who are struggling with employees taking advantage of California’s extremely broad definition of “disability” to protect their jobs. While justice may be served by the Court’s ruling in this egregious situation, the significant extension of the protections afforded by the FEHA will give countless employees additional ammunition with which to take advantage of the law. We call that hard cases making bad law.