PWFA requires accommodations for stillbirth, EEOC claims in a now-settled lawsuit

This sound is generated automatically. If you have any comments, please let us know.

Brief description of the dive:

Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, agreed to pay $100,000 to resolve allegations by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it failed to hire and fired an employee after she requested leave following the stillbirth, the EEOC announced on October 11.
The employee worked as a line cook, in accordance with Art complaint IN EEOC v. Lago Mar Properties, Inc. The complaint said she was hospitalized in the fifth month of pregnancy due to complications and gave birth to a stillborn baby. According to the lawsuit, she notified her supervisors and submitted a letter from her doctor stating she would need about six weeks to recover and grieve.
The lawsuit shows that the day after submitting the letter, the employee received notification of the termination of her employment contract. The EEOC sued Lago Mar for allegedly violating the Pregnant Employees Fairness Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under three years old consent decreethe facility agreed to revise its PWFA/ADA policy, provide employee training, and file reports with the EEOC every six months for the duration of the consent decree.

Diving Insights:

The EEOC praised Lago Mar “for implementing progressive workplace measures designed to prevent discrimination against pregnant and disabled employees and to ensure that its policies and procedures are consistent with legal obligations,” the agency said in the announcement.

Lago Mar did not respond to a request for comment by press time.

PWFA is accommodation statuteThe EEOC explained in its guidance. Requires employers to provide a qualified employee with a reasonable accommodation or accommodation for the applicant’s known limitations “related to pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions” unless the accommodation will cause the employer undue hardship.

As with the ADA, a qualified employee or applicant is typically someone who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation, the guidelines explain.

Similar to the ADA, employers are prohibited from retaliating against an employee or applicant for requesting or receiving a reasonable accommodation, the EEOC emphasizes.

However, unlike the ADA, under the PWFA, an employee’s or applicant’s pregnancy-related condition does not have to be serious. Instead, even those with healthy and normal pregnancies lawyers noted that they were entitled to reasonable accommodations.

The Lago Mar case once again puts employers on notice that the EEOC is actively enforcing the statute. The release said that since the law went into effect in 2023, this is the fifth time the EEOC has sued an employer for violating the PWFA.

There are three lessons to be learned from this case: First, it demonstrates that the EEOC considers stillbirth a “related medical condition.” Other related conditions listed in the EEOC guidelines include cesarean section, miscarriage, postpartum depression, edema, placenta previa and lactation.

Second, the case reminds employers that, as with the ADA, the EEOC expects them to achieve reasonable accommodations through an interactive process with the employee. In this case, Lago Mar allegedly “failed to engage (the employee) in any interactive process regarding her request for accommodation leave prior to termination of employment,” the complaint said.

Third, the case shows how the PWFA and ADA can overlap.

This means that although pregnancy itself is not a disability, a pregnant employee may have a pregnancy-related condition that qualifies as a disability under the ADA, the EEOC explains. Examples include: pelvic inflammatory disease causing severe pain and difficulty walking, pregnancy-related anemia, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, according to the guidelines.

In the Lago Mar case, under the ADA’s definition of disability, the EEOC alleged that the employee had significant impairment in performing major life activities, such as cooking, driving, concentrating, thinking, sitting, standing, caring for herself, and caring for a child, “duly suffered mental and physical trauma caused by the loss of the pregnancy in the fifth month and suffered from depression.”

According to the consent decree, the $100,000 that Lago Mar will pay to the employee includes $92,080 in compensatory damages and $7,920 in back wages.