A Nashville, TN, nursing facility violated the Americans with Disabilities Act when it fired a laundry technician with documented anxiety and must pay compensatory damages, a jury has decided.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought the case on behalf of a former employee of West Meade Place, which provides post-acute rehabilitation and nursing care. The EEOC claimed that the company discriminated against the laundry tech when it fired her because it believed she had a physical or mental impairment, despite her ability to do her job, an ADA violation.
US District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. awarded the employee $6,000 on Oct. 25. The court also will award back pay of $6,146.72.
“We hope this case causes employers to ensure they have procedures in the workplace explaining employees’ rights under the ADA and train their employees on the ADA,” said Faye A. Williams, regional attorney for the federal agency’s Memphis District Office, in a statement. “If employers fail to do this, there is a high cost to pay to defend these cases.”
The former employee saw a doctor regularly and took medication for anxiety. She worked for six months at West Meade in 2015 before requesting intermittent leave for bouts of anxiety triggered by negative interactions with her coworkers. A West Meade nursing director, however, decided that she did not qualify for family medical leave and fired her, according to the EEOC.
West Meade claimed that its nursing director was unaware that the employee was disabled and that she was fired for falsifying a doctor’s note that stated she was fit to return to work after having sought medical leave. A lower court had dismissed the case in 2019, concluding that a reasonable jury could not find that the employee met any of the statutory definitions of disability under the ADA.
That decision was overturned in February 2021, due to issues of material fact and “because a reasonable jury could find that [the director of nursing] regarded the employee as having an impairment,” according to a Feb. 8 ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
“This represented a very important case for the EEOC in ensuring protection in the workplace for employees whose employers regard them as having impairments,” said the EEOC’s Williams. “We are pleased the jury understood that West Meade discharged the employee because it believed she had an impairment in violation of the ADA.”
