Court Upholds ADA Verdict Against UPS in Psychiatric Disability Case

A few weeks ago, the Eighth Circuit affirmed a jury verdict against UPS on an ADA reasonable accommodation claim by a manager with depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.

This disability discrimination case caught my attention for a number of reasons.
First, it presents an example of a plaintiff managing to establish both that he is disabled enough to qualify for ADA protection and the almost-contradictary proposition that he is not too disabled to be able to perform the job with reasonable accommodation.

Second, and related to the first point, psychiatric conditions have often not been deemed serious enough to constitute disabilities under the ADA, but this plaintiff succeeded.

Third, the case contains favorable language and reaches a favorable result — from an employer perspective — on the availability of punitive damages.

Disability

On the first point, in concluding that the plaintiff was disabled because substantially limited in one or more major life activities, the court cited cases holding that the
“ability to perform cognitive functions on the level of an average person constitutes a major life activity” and “thinking and concentrating qualify as ‘major life activities’ under the
ADA.”

Applying this principle to the trial record, the court relied heavily on the testimony of the plaintiff’s doctor, who testified that the plaintiff was substantially limited in these major life activities because he “thinks and concentrates at a laborious rate, has to spend significant extra time working on projects, and cannot think and concentrate about matters unrelated to work.”

Although the doctor acknowledged that the plaintiff was “aided by psychiatric counseling and medication, he stated that [he] would continue to suffer similar limitations in his ability to think and concentrate in the foreseeable future.”

The court also found that the plaintiff’s status as an individual with a disability was supported by evidence of “effects that his depression and anxiety have caused in his daily life,” including that “even with counseling and medication, [the plaintiff] no longer makes household or financial decisions, or disciplines his children, because he does not have the ability to deal with extraneous or unexpected issues, conflicts, or demands outside of work,” instead focusing “almost exclusively on work, because it takes him longer to complete workplace tasks.”

Reasonable Accommodation

With this evidence of disability, the plaintiff risked being found not qualified to perform the essential functions of his job. Certainly, the ability to think and concentrate would seem necessary to most jobs, so that such evidence could be self-defeating for a disability discrimination plaintiff — winning the “disability” battle but leading directly to loss of the larger “qualified individual with a disability” battle.

Here, however, the court focused on the employer’s failure to work with the plaintiff in good faith to explore possible reasonable accommodations.

At one point, the plaintiff’s doctor had told the employer that the plaintiff “could perform his essential job functions, but that he could not perform the ‘marginal’ function of memorizing minute, unpredictable information from the daily operations report.” Accordingly, the doctor had suggested providing an “agenda to define which report categories he must memorize before each meeting.”

The plaintiff’s supervisor testified that such memorization was not necessary. Therefore, according to the court, the doctor’s release required returning the plaintiff to work “without further inquiry whether the requested agenda was a reasonable accommodation.”

The court also concluded, in the alternative, that the plaintiff had “presented evidence from which the jury could conclude that that his request for an agenda was a reasonable request for accommodation,” which the employer unlawfully failed to grant.

Specifically, although the employer claimed providing the requested agenda would delay its operations, it “instituted a similar accommodation for all Division Managers shortly after [plaintiff] returned to work.”

Classic disparate-treatment style evidence of pretext — holding the plaintiff to a standard (meeting without an agenda) to which others were not held.

Punitive Damages

The court held that the employer’s strongest attack on the jury verdict was that there was insufficient evidence to support punitive damages. The court stated that “paintiffs face a ‘formidable burden’ in seeking to recover punitive damages in employment discrimination cases such as this.”

The plaintiff claimed he was entitled to punitive damages because the employer had a policy requiring that employees with disabilities be “100% healed” before being returned to work, and that this policy flagrantly violated the ADA. However, the trial evidence did not establish that this was the employer’s actual policy.

Lessons learned.
In the courtroom, it may be difficult for employees with psychiatric conditions to qualify for ADA protection, as many reported cases will attest, but it is certainly not impossible, especially with an impressive medical witness.

Therefore, it is typically better to assume such employees have rights under the ADA, and explore reasonable accommodation, than to act on the basis that the employee’s condition is not an ADA disability.

Sometimes it may be better to grant a questionable requested accommodation and see if it works (or propose an alternative one and see if it is accepted) than to take a hard line.

Based on the description of the plaintiff’s condition, and the substantial job responsibilities involved (the plaintiff had supervisory responsibilities over approximately 600 employees at 11 UPS centers), he very well may have promptly failed, even with the requested agendas, had he returned to work.

The case is: Battle v. United Parcel Service, Inc. [.pdf] , No. 04-4123/04-4128 (8th Cir. February 21, 2006) .

For guidance on dealing with psychiatric disabilities, which present some of the toughest disability discrimination and reasonable accommodation issues, see: EEOC Enforcement Guidance on the Americans with Disabilites Act and Psychiatric Disabilities (March 1997)

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