San Francisco Employment Law Firm Blog
An employer who isn’t aware of your disability prior to firing you for taking several days off work due to that condition cannot possibly be held liable for disability discrimination based on the disability that the employer simply didn’t know about. This is both logical and fair.
In Avila v Continental Airlines, Inc. (2008), the employee was terminated for missing seven days at work, four of which were due to hospitalization for acute pancreatitis. That employee had provided to his employer two medical forms that only indicated that he was seen for illness or injury and that he was unable to work for a number of days. Avila further stated that he gave the two medical notes to his supervisor, but could not recall if he gave them to the supervisor directly or left them on the supervisor’s desk. Avila also told his coworkers about his pancreatitis, but he did not directly discuss the illness with his supervisors.
After Avila was terminated he informed his supervisor that he was absent due to pancreatitis, but the employer refused to reinstate him anyway. In its opinion dismissing the disability discrimination portion of that case, the court found that Avila could not establish that the managers who terminated him knew about his disability, because the medical notes provided lacked diagnostic information or other information indicating the nature of the plaintiff’s illness or injury, and the plaintiff never told his supervisors about his pancreatitis.
The Avila case teaches us several important lessons about these types of situations:
- In the absence of serious concerns about your medical privacy, you should err on the side of oversharing information about your medical condition and the underlying diagnosis with your employer before your termination, so that they can’t claim later that they did not know what health issue you had.
- Simply informing your employer that you missed work due to being sick isn’t sufficient to put the employer on notice of your medical condition, unless you also inform them of what illness and associated symptoms you have.
- Sharing your disability with your co-workers is insufficient and doesn’t in itself put your employer on notice of your disability.
- You can’t blindly rely on your doctor’s medical notes to provide legally sufficient information to your employer about your disability. Your physician’s job is to provide medical care and medical recommendations to you; not to ensure that his medical notes comply with the notice requirement of state and federal disability anti-discrimination laws. To be protected by disability anti-discrimination laws, you have to independently make sure that your medical notes that you provide to your employer contain diagnostic information about your illness, potential restrictions, etc.