Dive Brief:

• A New Jersey hospital operator will pay $77,550 to settle a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that alleged the employer violated the Americans with Disabilities Act when it withdrew a job offer from a hospitalized candidate, the agency announced March 3.
• The operator hired the candidate, who was pregnant, to fill an EMS dispatcher position. Before her start date, the employee was hospitalized for preeclampsia. The worker contacted the hospital's HR department with news of her diagnosis and asked what steps would follow. She needed a "minor accommodation" of a delayed start date, EEOC said, but the hospital withdrew its job offer.
• As part of its settlement, the hospital must report internal complaints of disability discrimination or retaliation to EEOC for the next 2.5 years.

Dive Insight:

The hospital's decision to withdraw its job offer violated the ADA's requirement to provide reasonable accommodations for employees with disabilities, EEOC said in its statement. 

The ADA defines a disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activity. The law does not consider pregnancy itself to be a disability, according to EEOC guidance. But certain conditions related to or caused by pregnancy can qualify as a disability. 

"The ADA affords women with pregnancy-related impairments the same right to reasonable accommodation as other employees who suffer with non-pregnancy-related disabilities," EEOC District Director Judy Keenan said of the settlement. "Targeted EEO training and revisions to anti-discrimination policies that highlight pregnancy-related impairments are concrete steps toward protecting candidates and employees from disability discrimination."

Employers may be interested to note that the EEOC interpreted the worker's question about "next steps" as a request for accommodation. As employment lawyers have long noted, it doesn't take much to trigger the ADA's protections. A worker may complain to a supervisor that she's having trouble logging data on a computer because of her chronic migraine headaches. Such a complaint puts the onus on employers to follow up with the worker and devise an accommodation, if necessary.

Another detail of this settlement may have piqued employers' interest: The woman's pre-employment status. The ADA's protections extend to both employed workers and job-seeking applicants. In fact, many ADA-related cases include accommodation issues arising during the application process.