California Employment Attorney Blog

In Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Lucent Technologies, Inc., the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an employee termination after a one-year disability accommodation leave.

The plaintiff employee's job as an installer required frequent heavy lifting of up to fifty pounds. The employee injured his back and could no longer lift heavy weights. Lucent's policy provided that if an employee could not return to work within one year, the employee would be terminated, absent a doctor's opinion that the employee would be healed in six months. The employee took leave under the policy.

While the employee was on leave, his doctors constantly revised his status, but the employee was never fully cleared to return. Lucent kept in contact with the employee, consistently evaluated the new restrictions, and continued to accommodate the employee, providing him with the one year of leave. When the employee finally returned upon expiration of the leave, his doctor had cleared him to occasionally lift weights of twenty to fifty pounds. Lucent terminated him. Two months after the employee was terminated, his doctor finally cleared him to lift fifty pounds. The employee sued Lucent for disability discrimination and related claims. The District Court ruled in favor of Lucent, and the employee appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

Continue reading "Rare Disability Leave Win for California Employers" »

In a unanimous decision the California Appeals Court recently ruled that California's "kin care" statute does not apply to all compensated time off for illness, but is limited to accrued sick leave.

In McCarther v. Pacific Bell Telesis Group et al., 2010 DJDAR 2487, the plaintiffs alleged that the employer violated Labor Code § 233 by failing to provide paid sick leave to employees caring for sick relatives.

Labor Code § 233 requires employers that provide sick leave to permit their employees to use, in any calendar year, up to half their accrued annual sick leave to attend to the employee's ill child, parent, spouse, or domestic partner.

The Court of Appeals had to decide whether the legislature intended to broadly define "sick leave" to include all compensated time off for illness, or merely a narrower definition of only accrued sick leave.

Continue reading "California Appellate Court Holds Kin Care Law Applies Only to Accrual Policies" »