Dive Brief:
- Lago Mar Beach Resort & Club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, agreed to pay $100,000 to settle allegations by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it failed to accommodate and fired an employee after she asked for leave following a stillbirth, the EEOC announced Oct. 11.
- The employee worked as a line cook, per the complaint in EEOC v. Lago Mar Properties, Inc. During her fifth month of pregnancy, she was hospitalized for complications and suffered the stillbirth, the complaint said. She notified her supervisors and submitted a letter from her doctor stating that she would need about six weeks to recuperate and grieve, according to the lawsuit.
- The day after the employee submitted the letter, she received notification of her termination, the lawsuit said. The EEOC sued Lago Mar for allegedly violating the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Under a three-year consent decree, the resort agreed to revise its PWFA/ADA policies, provide training to staff and report every six months to the EEOC for the duration of the consent decree.
Dive Insight:
The EEOC commended Lago Mar “for implementing progressive measures in the workplace to prevent discrimination against pregnant and disabled employees and ensure that their policies and procedures align with those legal obligations,” the agency stated in the announcement.
Lago Mar did not respond to a request for a comment prior to press time.
The PWFA is an accommodation statute, the EEOC clarified in a guidance. It requires employers to provide a reasonable accommodation to a qualified employee or applicant’s known limitation “related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions,” unless the accommodation will cause the employer undue hardship.
Similar to the ADA, a qualified employee or applicant is generally one who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodation, the guidance explains.
Also as with the ADA, employers may not retaliate against an employee or applicant for asking for or using a reasonable accommodation, the EEOC points out.
However, unlike the ADA, under the PWFA, an employee or applicant’s pregnancy-related condition need not be severe. Instead, even those with healthy and normal pregnancies are entitled to a reasonable accommodation, attorneys have noted.
The Lago Mar case puts employers on notice, once again, that the EEOC is actively enforcing the statute. This is the fifth time the EEOC has sued an employer for violating the PWFA since the law took effect in 2023, the announcement said.
The case has three takeaways: First, it shows the EEOC considers a stillbirth to be a “related medical condition.” Other related conditions listed in the EEOC guidance include cesarian sections, a miscarriage, postpartum depression, edema, placenta previa and lactation.
Second, the case reminds employers that, as with the ADA, the EEOC expects them to arrive at a reasonable accommodation through an interactive process with the employee. Here, Lago Mar allegedly “did not engage [the employee] in any interactive process concerning her request for leave as an accommodation prior to terminating her employment,” the complaint said.
Third, the case highlights how the PWFA and the ADA can overlap.
That is, 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 inflammation causing severe pain and difficulty walking, pregnancy-related anemia, gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, according to the guidance.
In the Lago Mar case, consistent with the ADA’s definition of disability, the EEOC alleged that the employee was substantially impaired in the major life activities of cooking, driving, concentrating, thinking, sitting, standing, caring for herself and providing child care “due to the mental and physical trauma from losing her pregnancy at five months, and she suffered from depression.”
Per the consent decree, the $100,000 Lago Mar will pay the employee includes $92,080 in compensatory damages and $7,920 in back pay.
