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Sears Agrees to Multimillion-Dollar Settlement Over Firing of Disabled Workers
The National Law Journal
September 30, 2009
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced a record $6.2 million Americans with Disabilities Act settlement of a nationwide class action against Sears, Roebuck & Co. over the firing of disabled workers. The agency described it as the largest ADA settlement in a single EEOC lawsuit.
The EEOC had sued Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based Sears in 2004 following a complaint from an injured appliance service technician. Former Sears employee John Bava told the EEOC that Sears fired him after he took a leave for knee, wrist and back injuries suffered on the job, the EEOC said in a Tuesday press release. Bava tried repeatedly to return to work despite his continuing disabilities.
In pretrial discovery, the EEOC said, it found hundreds of other employees had encountered the same treatment at Sears, which routinely declined to make accommodations to bring back employees who had taken workers' compensation leave or to offer them a brief extension of their leave to make it possible for them to return later.
U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen, who sits in the Northern District of Illinois, approved the consent decree that settled the case on Tuesday.
The settlement should be a wake-up call for employers who lack policies that incorporate the requirement of both workers' compensation laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act, said EEOC lawyer Deborah Hamilton. "It's the intersection of the workers' compensation laws and the ADA that has been an area where employers have struggled with regard to compliance," she said. "They often look at policies only through the lens of workers' compensation laws and don't consider the ADA obligations."
Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, which represented Sears in the case, didn't return calls seeking comment.
Sears said in a statement that it settled the case to avoid expensive, multi-year litigation over the matter, but maintained that its policies are geared to meet the requirements of the ADA. "Despite the settlement, Sears continues to believe that it reasonably accommodates its associates on leave due to work-related illnesses or injuries under the Americans with Disabilities Act," the company said.
While the settlement doesn't include job reinstatement for the former Sears workers, the company has changed its policy to make it easier for workers to return from leave in the future, said Hamilton, the EEOC lawyer. Sears' statement said that the company has set up a centralized leave management team to oversee the terms of the consent decree.
The EEOC can't estimate at this time how many former Sears employees may be eligible for compensation under the settlement or how much each employee will be paid, Hamilton said. A court hearing is scheduled for February to determine the fairness of individual payments from the $6.2 million fund.
