2nd Circuit Considers NYSHRL Reasonable Accomodation Disability Discrimination; NYCHRL Applicability; COBRA Notice Requirements

In Vangas v. Montefiore Med. Ctr., No. 15-1514-CV, 2016 WL 2909354 (2d Cir. May 19, 2016), the Second Circuit ruled for defendant on plaintiff’s claims that she was subjected to disability discrimination under the NYS and NYC Human Rights Laws, and that her COBRA notice was defective.

In sum, plaintiff alleged that the defendant terminated her when she did not return from work after taking leave following her cancer diagnosis. A jury found in her favor on her NYSHRL discrimination claim and awarded her damages. The district court denied the employer’s motions for judgment as a matter of law and for new trial on that claim. The Second Circuit held that that was error.

NYSHRL Failure to Reasonably Accommodate Disability

The law, as summarized by the court:

To succeed on her NYSHRL claim, Vangas needed to prove that: (1) she had a disability; (2) MMC had notice of her disability; (3) with reasonable accommodation she could perform the essential functions of her job; and (4) MMC refused to make such accommodation. … A reasonable accommodation is one which permits an employee with a disability to perform in a reasonable manner the activities involved in the job and does not impose an undue hardship on the employer’s business. If, even with a reasonable accommodation, an employee is unable to perform the core duties of their job, the employee does not have a disability covered by the statute and the employer may take adverse employment action. The relevant time for considering whether an employee is capable of performing the essential functions of the job is at the time the employer refused to accommodate the disability.

Applying the law, the court explained why the district court should have ruled for defendant:

At the time of her final request for leave and termination, Vangas was incapable of performing the essential functions of her job. She was not medically cleared to return to work and admitted that she could not do so. Therefore, at that time, the only possible accommodation was an extension of leave, as she was incapable of working, in any capacity, whether at home or in the office. Vangas did not request an extension of leave for a specific time period—she simply informed MMC that she was not feeling well, would not be returning to work on August 30, 2010, and could not give MMC a date for her return to work. The district court correctly interpreted these actions as requesting an indefinite leave extension, which as a matter of law is not a reasonable accommodation [under the NYS Human Rights Law]. …

[T]he relevance of [plaintiff’s work-from-home] request is negated by her decline in health and admission that she was not able to work by the end of August 2010. At the time of her request to work from home, Vangas was not medically cleared to return to work. Vangas never asserted that working from home would have been feasible after she developed new symptoms. Vangas would have needed an indefinite amount of leave at the end of August 2010, regardless of whether she was working from home or in the office at that point, and as discussed above, MMC did not violate the NYSHRL by refusing to provide indefinite leave. Thus, whether the request was made earlier in the month, and whether her essential job functions could have been performed remotely, were not material facts for the jury to resolve.

[A]t the time of her termination, Vangas could not work and needed an extension of her already expired leave. She was unable to specify how much additional time she would need and requested an indefinite amount of time and her prior request to work from home was ultimately eclipsed by her decline in health. Accordingly, there was no reasonable request for accommodation that MMC declined to consider through an interactive process or otherwise. Because there was no reasonable accommodation requested that would have allowed Vangas to perform the essential functions of her job, MMC did not violate the NYSHRL in terminating Vangas and no reasonable juror could have concluded otherwise.

NYCHRL Applicability

The court also held that the (comparatively broader) NYC Human Rights Law was inapplicable here, because plaintiff failed to show that “her termination had an impact within” New York City.

Specifically:

Vangas has not satisfied the impact test because her only contacts with NYC are tangential. Vangas argues that the impact of her termination was felt in NYC because … she spoke with patients in NYC on the phone and those patients were impacted when she no longer worked with them. These meager interactions with NYC residents do not rise to the level of those rejected in Hoffman [v. Parade Publications, 15 N.Y.3d 285 (2010)]. … Vangas worked in Yonkers, was supervised in Yonkers, was terminated in Yonkers, and does not allege that she ever went to NYC for work. Under the NYCHRL the impact of the employment action must be felt by the plaintiff in NYC. … To hold otherwise, such that the NYCHRL would cover employees who work at call centers outside the city and whose only contacts with NYC are phone conversations with persons in the city, would broaden the statute impermissibly beyond those “who work in the city.” That the patients Vangas communicated with lived in NYC did not affect her job in any way; their location was irrelevant. Accordingly, because Vangas’s termination did not impact her in NYC, the district court properly dismissed the claim and we affirm.

 

COBRA Notice

Finally, the court held that the employer complied with the COBRA statute’s notice requirements, notwithstanding the address including an incorrectly abbreviated town name.

The law:

Under COBRA, an employer must notify a terminated employee of the right to elect continuing health coverage under the employer’s group rate. COBRA does not indicate how notice should be given, but other courts have held that the statute does not require that notices actually be received; rather, so long as the administrator has sent the notice by means reasonably calculated to reach the recipient, the employer has made a sufficient good faith effort to comply with the statute. We agree that this is the proper standard. When an employer mails a COBRA notice to the covered employee’s last known address, the notice is reasonably calculated and the employer is deemed to be in good faith compliance with COBRA’s notification requirements.

The court concluded that “the incorrectly abbreviated town name on the COBRA notice does not render the notice invalid”, noting among other things that the employer “had adequate procedures in place to ensure COBRA notice delivery and presented sufficient evidence that those procedures were followed in this case.”

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