By Jim Cline and Erica Shelley Nelson
Representing the Injured or Disabled Member
Part 10: The Duty to Accommodate With a Change in Schedule
This article is the 10th in a multiple part series covering the rights your injured and disabled members have and how you, as a union or guild representative, can best assist them. Over the next two to three months, we’ll be publishing, in various segments, information on how state and federal laws protect your members who are hurt or otherwise unable to work. We’ll cover topics including disability discrimination law, the FMLA, job protection rights under the CBA, workers compensation, disability benefits, and the right to bring a civil lawsuit.
The topics we are covering all also going to be addressed in detail in an upcoming book we’re publishing: Helping the Injured or Disabled Member: A Guidebook for the Washington Law Enforcement and Fire Union Representative. It is also our intention over the course of the next year to travel through the state and provide training to public safety union and guild representatives on how best to enforce these rights. Expect to hear more on that in the months ahead.
The 10th article in these newsletter series provides an overview and introduction to the rights of accommodation under disability laws. For more information, visit our Premium Website. On the website you’ll find an on line version of the Injured or Disabled Member’s Guidebook and other information on the laws covering your members.
Often, public safety employees have a disability which impairs their ability to work around-the-clock, or, at least, in frequently rotating shifts. As one example of a common disability, diabetes, at least for some individuals, impedes their ability to rotate back and forth through the 24/7 shifts because of the health implications of such schedule changes. There are a variety of other health issues which can be aggravated by shift work.
The federal courts are divided as to whether restructuring the hours of work is a reasonable accommodation. The majority view is that if an accommodation such as this can be made, it should be made. In some departments, though, especially smaller ones, this type of accommodation can have a much greater negative impact on the department’s ability to get the work scheduled and, for that reason alone, could be seen as an “undue hardship.” In larger departments, this type of accommodation would not normally involve an undue hardship. But it may be an undue hardship within particular classifications where fewer personnel are assigned, and the impacts necessarily are greater.
In the next article in this series, we’ll explore the challenging issues that are involved with employees suffering from mental health limitations.
