A Chair is a Reasonable ADA Accommodation in Business and at Work

Pop Quiz – which is more cost-effective?

• Providing a chair to a hotel front desk employee with a medically documented back impairment as a reasonable accommodation; or
• Paying $100k in paid leave, penalties and other relief to settle a lawsuit for not proving a chair as the reasonable accommodation?

The chair, of course. (Dingdingdingding!)

For those of you who work in retail or hospitality, standing behind a counter for the majority of a work shift is a typical job-related requirement for most employees, except when the employee has a disability covered under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). For example, sitting on a chair behind a department store cosmetics counter is a common reasonable accommodation for pregnancy disability.

What’s puzzling (and which cost Hyatt $100k as a result of their lawsuit settlement with the EEOC), is that they initially (and correctly) granted the accommodation for an employee with a back impairment, where prolonged standing aggravated the employee’s impairment, causing severe pain. After 2 weeks of accommodating the employee with a chair, Hyatt for some reason reversed the accommodation and refused to let the employee use the chair and failed to provide any other accommodation.  (I’ll bet you dinner that Hyatt HR arranged and approved the initial reasonable accommodation, but some non-HR-manager in the employee’s management chain decided to cancel the accommodation themselves without consulting HR.)

The EEOC loves misinformed / freestyle employer actions like this – it’s an automatic penalty win for the EEOC and the affected employee, which is why the EEOC is always happy to swiftly sue the employer. (And it doesn’t matter if some rogue manager took it upon themselves to take the reasonable accommodation away – any non-compliant / discriminatory action by a manager is automatic liability for the employer.) As the New York EEOC District Director observed: “Federal law on disability accommodations is very clear – employers must provide a reasonable accommodation so long as it does not cause an undue burden.  Something as simple as providing a chair for an employee working at a desk is rarely burdensome.”

The EEOC correctly ruled that being seated did not interfere with the employee’s ability to do their job. Aside from the non-compliant action – where’s the compassion for the employee’s pain?

Do you (and your managers) understand that a chair is a (no-cost) reasonable accommodation, in business and at work?