ADA ruling: Extreme cost not enough to label accommodation a ‘hardship’
Sorry folks, but relying on cost alone to justify labeling a disabled employee’s accommodation request an “undue hardship” isn’t going to cut it in court if you get sued — even if the price tag for the accommodation is $120,000.
Employers who deny accommodation requests have to be prepared to show either:
- there’s some other justification for why an accommodation would create an undue hardship (such as an impact on operations or others’ workloads), or
- the cost is so great that it would hinder some part of the business (i.e., specifically state why the high cost is a problem).
In other words, employers can’t just say, “Well, it’s too expensive,” or “We don’t have room in the budget” and leave it at that, according to a U.S. District Court in Maryland.
The court recently taught Johns Hopkins Hospital that lesson.
‘No money in the budget’
Here’s what happened:
Upon graduating from Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, Lauren Searls applied for a nursing position at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Searls is deaf, and during her clinical placements at Johns Hopkins Hospital the school provided her with a full-time American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter.
So when she was offered a job at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Searls informed the hospital that she would need a full-time ASL interpreter.
The hospital, to its credit, didn’t deny Searls request outright. It investigated how much an ASL interpreter would cost.
It then concluded that providing one would set the hospital back $120,000 per year.
After reaching that conclusion, the hospital rescinded the job offer. It claimed that in the department to which Searls would be assigned:
“There are no other funds to pull from within our department. The interpreters would be an ongoing operating expense that is not budgeted or funded. Thus, our threshold is zero for interpreter costs.”
In addition to claiming that the department had no money in the budget for interpreters, the hospital said that paying an interpreter $120,000 would force the hospital to lay off two nurses making $60,000 apiece.
As a result, the hospital claimed that providing Searls with an ASL interpreter would amount to an undue hardship.
Searls then filed an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) lawsuit against the hospital. She said she was being discriminated against on the basis of her disability.
‘An irrelevant factor’
Searls ended up winning the case, and the court granted her summary judgment. Now Johns Hopkins could be facing some hefty damages.
The court ruled that relying on a budget for reasonable accommodations is “an irrelevant factor in assessing undue hardship.” It said that “allowing [an employer] to prevail on its undue hardship defense based on its own budgeting decisions would effectively cede the legal determination on this issue to the employer that allegedly failed to accommodate an employee with a disability. Taken to its logical extreme, the employer could budget $0 for reasonable accommodations and thereby always avoid liability.”
In addition, the court said even the fact that an ASL interpreter could cost more than twice the salary of a nurse isn’t enough — on its own — to establish an undue hardship. It explained that the EEOC’s interpretive guidance explains that “[s]imply comparing the cost of the accommodation to the salary of the individual with a disability in need of the accommodation will not suffice.”
The court also attacked the hospital’s budget calculations, saying if the hospital was going to talk budget, it needed to take its entire budget into account — not just that of the department Searls was to work in. If the hospital had done that, the court determined that the cost of the interpreter would’ve accounted for 0.007% of the hospital’s entire operational budget of $1.7 billion.
As a result, the court said the hospital ignored the question of how providing an accommodation that would account for such a small portion of the hospital’s budget could’ve imposed an undue hardship.
Cite: Searls v. Johns Hopkins Hospital
