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Reasonable Accommodation Lawyer: When Your Employer Won’t Work With Your Disability

Asked for an accommodation and got a no, a runaround, or a pink slip?

You asked for something small. A schedule change so you could make your appointments. A chair. A lifting limit for a few weeks after surgery. Time off for treatment. Permission to sit, to work from home two days a week, to step away when a panic attack hits.

And the answer was no. Or it was “we’ll get back to you,” and nobody did. Or you were told your doctor’s note wasn’t good enough, or that you couldn’t come back until you were “100 percent.” Or you came back to find your job given to someone else, or your hours cut — or you were let go a few weeks later for a reason that didn’t sound right.

Ortiz Law Office represents employees, never employers. Here’s what California law actually requires of your employer, in plain terms.

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What the law actually protects

California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act says that when a worker has a disability or medical condition that affects the job, the employer has to make reasonable changes so the worker can keep doing it. The law calls that a reasonable accommodation. It can be almost anything that works: a different schedule, modified duties, equipment, a transfer to an open position, time off to recover, or an exception to a policy that gets in the way. It applies to any California employer with five or more employees.

Three things about this surprise most people.

The definition of “disability” is broad in California. It’s broader than the federal law. A condition counts if it makes a major life activity — working, walking, sleeping, concentrating, lifting — harder than it would otherwise be. It doesn’t have to be severe or permanent. Back injuries, depression, anxiety, diabetes, migraines, cancer, pregnancy-related conditions, injuries you’re still recovering from, and injuries you got at work can all qualify. (Minor, short-lived things — a cold, the flu, a sprain that heals in a week — generally don’t.) It also covers being treated as disabled: if your employer assumed you couldn’t do the job because of a condition, you may be protected even if it was wrong about the condition. And if your employer treated you worse because of a condition like this, that’s disability discrimination, which often travels with the accommodation claim.

You don’t have to ask in any special way. You don’t have to say “accommodation,” name your diagnosis, or fill out a form. Telling your supervisor that your doctor has you on restrictions, or that you’re struggling because of a medical issue, can be enough. The law can even hold an employer responsible when it learns about your condition some other way — from a note, from watching you, from someone else — and does nothing.

Once the employer knows, the work is mostly theirs to do. The employer has an affirmative duty to reasonably accommodate you — meaning it has to actually make the changes, not just consider them. To get there, the law also requires the employer to sit down with you, in good faith, and figure out what would work. Lawyers call this the interactive process. It’s supposed to be a real, two-way conversation — not a form letter, not a demand for paperwork you can’t get, and not silence. But the conversation is the means; the accommodation is the obligation. Your part is to cooperate: give the employer reasonable medical documentation of your restrictions when asked, and tell them what you need. An employee who won’t share what their limitations are can be blamed for the breakdown.

Signs this may be happening to you

• You told your employer about a medical restriction and nothing happened. No meeting, no follow-up, no accommodation.
• You were told the company “doesn’t do” light duty, modified schedules, or remote work — a blanket policy, with no discussion of your situation.
• You were told you can’t come back until you’re fully healed or have “no restrictions.”
• You were put on unpaid leave when you could have kept working with a small change.
• Your protected leave ran out and you were fired that day or soon after, even though a few more weeks would have gotten you back.
• You were told to “apply for other openings” instead of being kept in your own job.
• You were asked for medical records that went well beyond what the restriction required, and when you questioned it, the conversation stopped.
• Your reviews got worse right after you disclosed a condition, and the problems being written up are the ones your condition causes.
• You were fired, demoted, or had your hours cut within weeks of asking.

What you’d have to show

A failure-to-accommodate claim generally comes down to four things:

1. You have a disability or medical condition the law recognizes — and the bar is lower than most people assume.
2. Your employer knew about it, because you told them, because it was obvious, or because they learned some other way.
3. You could do the core parts of your job with a reasonable accommodation. The law calls those core parts the essential functions. Not every task counts. A duty you do rarely, or that other people could pick up, may not be essential — even if it appears in your job description.
4. A reasonable accommodation was available — a specific change that would have let you keep working — and your employer failed to offer it.

That fourth point is the heart of the claim. You do have to be able to point to an accommodation that would have worked: a schedule change, a lifting limit, a few more weeks of leave, a transfer to an open position. “They should have done something” isn’t enough; “they could have done this” is.

What you do not have to show matters just as much.

You don’t have to prove your employer disliked you, or disliked people with disabilities. You don’t have to show you asked for that exact accommodation at the time — what matters is that it existed and would have worked. And you don’t have to prove it would have been easy or cheap for the company. If the company wants to argue it would have been too hard, that’s a defense it has to prove — called undue hardship — and the standard is significant difficulty or expense, measured against the company’s size and resources. Not inconvenience.

There’s also a second claim: being punished for asking. California treats a request for accommodation as protected activity in its own right. Firing, demoting, or cutting the hours of someone because they asked can be retaliation, whether or not the request was granted.

What the company will probably say

“She never asked for an accommodation.” Not required. Telling a supervisor about a restriction, handing over a doctor’s note, or visibly struggling with a known condition can be enough to put the next move on the company.

“We offered her leave — that’s an accommodation.” Sometimes it is. But California’s regulations say that when an employee can work with some other reasonable accommodation, the employer may not require them to take a leave of absence instead. Parking someone on leave to avoid a schedule change can be a failure to accommodate, not an accommodation.

“Lifting / standing / being on-site is an essential function.” The company’s view counts, but it doesn’t get the last word. Whether a duty is truly essential depends on how much of the job it is, whether others could do it, what the job description says, and what happens if it isn’t done. If the company excused other employees from the same duty in the past, that’s evidence the duty may not be essential.

“We told her to apply for other positions.” Pointing an employee at the job board is not reassignment, and reassignment is itself a last resort — something to consider only after the current job can’t be made to work. If you could have stayed in your job with a reasonable change, being told to go find another one isn’t compliance. And when reassignment is the right answer, the employer has to do the looking: identify open positions you could do, and give you preference for them over other applicants at the same level.

“Her leave ran out, so we had no choice.” Running out of CFRA or FMLA leave doesn’t end the employer’s duties under the disability law. In fact, the regulations say that when an employee’s leave is running out, that by itself is supposed to start the accommodation conversation. More time off — a defined amount, with a realistic chance you’d return — can itself be a reasonable accommodation. Treating “you’re out of leave” as the end of the conversation may skip a required step.

“We couldn’t accommodate her safely.” The law does allow an employer to refuse an accommodation that would create a significant risk to your health or safety or someone else’s. But this is a defense the employer has to prove to a jury, and it can’t be based on speculation. It has to rest on medical evidence about your condition and the actual job, not on a manager’s worry about what might happen someday. “I didn’t want her to reinjure herself,” with nothing behind it, isn’t proof of a safety risk — it’s a statement that the restriction was the reason.

“It would have been too much of a burden.” This is the undue hardship defense, and the company has to prove it with evidence: actual cost, actual disruption. Companies that fire instead of accommodate often never gathered that evidence, because they never did the analysis.

What you may be able to recover

• Lost pay and benefits, back to when the harm started and in some cases going forward.
• Emotional distress — the stress, anxiety, and humiliation of being pushed out of a job you could do. Your own account of what this did to you is evidence.
• Punitive damages, which require proof that the employer acted with malice, oppression, or fraud.
• Attorney’s fees and costs. The Fair Employment and Housing Act generally lets a worker who wins recover the cost of bringing the case.
• Reinstatement, or a court order requiring the accommodation, in some cases.

Unlike the federal disability law, California’s law puts no cap on the amount of damages a jury can award.

Deadlines

A claim under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act starts with a complaint to the state’s Civil Rights Department before you can file a lawsuit, and that first step has its own deadline, counted from the date of the harm. It is easier to miss than people expect — especially when the harm is a series of small refusals rather than a single firing, because the question of when the clock started gets complicated. Different claims can run on different clocks. Don’t guess. Have the deadlines for your situation confirmed as early as you can.

What to do now

1. Put your request in writing, even if you already made it out loud. A short email to your supervisor or HR — “As we discussed, my doctor has me on [restriction]; I’m asking for [change]” — creates a record and a date.
2. Get the restriction from your doctor in writing, describing what you can’t do and for how long — not your diagnosis. You generally don’t have to hand over your full medical file.
3. Keep your own copies of doctor’s notes, emails, the handbook section on accommodations, and your recent reviews. Keep them off work devices and work accounts.
4. Write down the timeline: when you told them, who you told, what they said, and every date after that.
5. Don’t quit yet, and don’t sign anything yet. Walking away can cost you claims, and a severance agreement can waive them. Have the severance paperwork reviewed first. If the situation has become unbearable, talk to a lawyer before you resign — the law treats some resignations as firings, but it’s a high bar.
6. Talk to an employment lawyer soon, because of the deadlines.

Talk to us

If you asked your employer to work with a medical condition and were ignored, put on leave, told to find another job, or let go, we’d like to hear what happened. The consultation is free and confidential, and there’s no obligation. We represent employees only.

If we take your case, you don’t pay us unless we recover money for you.

Ortiz Law Office, Inc.
1431 Ocean Ave. Ste. 900, Santa Monica, CA 90401
888-376-7849
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This page is general information about California law. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every situation is different, and outcomes depend on facts we would need to review.