Pregnancy Discrimination And Light Duty Policies: The Supreme Court Changes The Rules

Courtney Leyes' article "Pregnancy Discrimination and Light Duty Policies: the Supreme Court Changes the Rules" was featured in HR Professionals Magazine on May 5, 2015.

In 2006, our firm represented the employer in a lawsuit and subsequent appeal when the plaintiff employee had been fired when she was pregnant, because, as a fairly new employee, she had no Family Medical Leave Act leave and no leave available under the employer's leave policies, and the employer refused her request for light duty since she had suffered no job-related injury. Both the Memphis federal judge and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with us that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) just meant that employers had to treat pregnant employees the same as other employees with illnesses, i.e., there was no windfall for pregnant employees under the Act. Reeves v. Swift Transportation, 446 F.3d 637 (6th Cir. 2006).

Our client prevailed in that case, but would the company prevailed today? Well, in March, the U.S. Supreme Court reached an opposite conclusion with similar facts than our prior case. Young v. UPS, No. 12-1226 (Mar. 25, 2015). In this new precedent, UPS's policy limited light-duty accommodations to three classes of employees regardless of whether they had sought light duty for pregnancy. According to the Supreme Court, the plaintiff had sufficiently demonstrated that there was a real fact dispute as to whether the employer had unreasonably treated other non-pregnant employees more favorably. Id.

In the article, Courtney discusses how companies should apply the Supreme Court's Ruling in...