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Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued October 27, 2006 Decided March 2, 2007

No. 05-7137

HAZEL V. MAYERS,

APPELLANT

v.

LABORERS’ HEALTH & SAFETY FUND OF NORTH AMERICA,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 01cv02671)

John E. Carpenter argued the cause and filed the briefs for

appellant.

James S. Ray argued the cause and filed the brief for

appellee.

Before: GINSBURG, Chief Judge, and SENTELLE and TATEL,

Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed PER CURIAM.

PER CURIAM: Hazel V. Mayers appeals the district court’s

grant of summary judgment in favor of her former employer, the

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Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA),

on her allegations of discrimination, retaliation, and constructive

discharge in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act

(ADA), 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq. Although we disagree with

several aspects of the district court’s analysis, we agree that

summary judgment was appropriate.

I.

Mayers worked for LHSFNA from November 1992 until

January 2001, initially as a data entry clerk, and then, beginning

in February 1996, assembling desktop publishing materials.

Shortly after being transferred to the desktop publishing

position, Mayers developed rheumatoid arthritis, making her

new responsibilities—cutting, stapling, and the like—painful

and difficult to complete. According to Mayers, she notified

LHSFNA of her disease soon after being diagnosed. A year

later, Mayers says, in July 1997, she requested an electric stapler

and cutter, but LHSFNA failed to provide the tools. The

following year, in April 1998, Mayers’s co-worker in the

desktop publishing operation was promoted, leaving Mayers

with twice the work, but still no electric tools. Although

LHSFNA promised to provide an electric cutter, it again failed

to do so. 

In April 1999, Mayers’s physician sent a letter to LHSFNA

stating that because of her condition, “she often has flares with

severe swelling and pain of multiple joints. At these times the

patient should be placed on light duty.” Another year went by,

and in March 2000, the physician sent a second letter, this time

stating that Mayers’s condition “obviously causes swelling and

inflammation of her joints,” as a result of which, “she is unable

to perform the current task she has been asked to do.” The next

month, Mayers told LHSFNA’s Assistant Executive Director

that the publishing work hurt her hands. Thereafter, LHSFNA

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provided Mayers with an electric cutter, and two months later,

an electric stapler. Roughly three years had passed between her

initial request and receipt of the tools. According to Mayers,

moreover, after LHSFNA provided the electric tools, it

increased her workload and, contrary to her physician’s

recommendation, failed to place her on “light duty.”

Appellant’s Br. 5.

On December 22, 2000, Mayers began a one-week vacation.

Then in the middle of a 4,000-brochure project with a December

29 deadline and believing that someone else would finish the

project in her absence, she returned on January 2, 2001, to find

the project uncompleted. She finished the project the next day

and in doing so, she says, severely exacerbated her arthritis. On

January 19, she resigned effective January 26. Even before the

January incident, though, Mayers had applied for a position with

another employer, where she began work on January 29. 

On March 12, 2001, Mayers filed a complaint with the

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging

that LHSFNA failed to reasonably accommodate her arthritis,

retaliated against her for requesting a reasonable

accommodation, and constructively discharged her. See 42

U.S.C. § 12112 (prohibiting discrimination in employment on

the basis of disability); 42 U.S.C. § 12203(a) (prohibiting

retaliation for asserting an ADA claim). The EEOC issued a

“Dismissal and Notice of Rights” letter in September, see 29

C.F.R. § 1601.19(a) (setting forth EEOC procedure for issuing

letters of determination), and Mayers filed suit in the district

court soon thereafter, see 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(f)(1) (authorizing

suit by person claiming to be aggrieved within 90 days of

dismissal of an EEOC complaint). The district court granted

summary judgment for LHSFNA on all of Mayers’s claims.

The court rejected Mayers’s failure-to-accommodate claim

because LHSFNA had provided the electric tools, “albeit

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slowly,” and because Mayers had never—as far as the record

indicated—informed LHSFNA that she was experiencing the

“flare ups” referenced in the physician’s letter. Mayers v.

Laborers’ Health & Safety Fund of North America, 404 F. Supp.

2d 59, 61 (D.D.C. 2005). The constructive discharge claim

failed because Mayers had “voluntarily left her employment

with LHSFNA.” Id. The court rejected Mayers’s retaliation

claim, finding that she had suffered no “adverse employment

action” given her testimony that the only retaliatory action she

suffered was that her co-workers acted “like she was not

there”—actions the district court found insufficient to establish

a case of unlawful retaliation. Id. at 61-62. Mayers appeals. 

II.

In considering a district court’s grant of summary judgment,

our review is de novo, Smith v. District of Columbia, 430 F.3d

450, 454 (D.C. Cir. 2005), and we may affirm “on a ground not

relied upon by the lower court, provided that the opposing party

has had a fair opportunity to dispute the facts material to that

ground,” Washburn v. Lavoie, 437 F.3d 84, 89 (D.C. Cir. 2006).

In support of its motion for summary judgment, LHSFNA

argued that because Mayers’s EEOC complaint was untimely,

she had failed to exhaust her administrative remedies. Although

the district court never addressed this argument, we shall,

because it disposes of all issues, save one. 

The ADA incorporates the procedural provisions of Title

VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, 42 U.S.C.

§ 2000e et seq., including the requirement that an injured

individual file an EEOC charge “within one hundred and eighty

days after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred.”

42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(e)(1); see also 42 U.S.C. § 12117

(incorporating procedural elements of Title VII). Although

EEOC regulations extend the deadline for filing to 300 days

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when it has a worksharing agreement with a state or local

agency, see 29 C.F.R. § 1601.13(a)(4)(ii), Mayers does not

allege the existence of such an agreement nor does she dispute

the applicability of the 180-day deadline to her case. Because

Mayers failed to file her EEOC complaint until March 12, 2001,

the complaint was timely only as to events transpiring on or

after September 13, 2000. Accordingly, except for the January

brochure project, all of Mayers’s claims, including LHSFNA’s

failure to provide electric tools, are barred. 

Mayers asserts that she should nonetheless be deemed to

have exhausted her administrative remedies with respect to her

pre-September allegations pursuant to the continuing violations

doctrine. Under that doctrine, “if the alleged acts constitute one

similar pattern or practice and at least one illegal act took place

within the filing period, then the complaint of discrimination is

not time-barred and acts outside the statutory period may be

considered for purposes of liability.” Singletary v. District of

Columbia, 351 F.3d 519, 526 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (internal

quotation marks and citation omitted). According to Mayers,

LHSFNA’s “misconduct was pervasive and constituted an

ongoing violation dating from April of 1996.” Appellant’s

Reply Br. 9. The continuing violations doctrine, however, has

two crucial limiting principles, neither mentioned by Mayers

and both derived from the Supreme Court’s ruling in National

Railroad Passenger Corp. v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101 (2002).

First, the doctrine has no applicability to “[d]iscrete acts such as

termination, failure to promote, denial of transfer, or refusal to

hire” because “[e]ach incident of discrimination and each

retaliatory adverse employment action constitutes a separate

actionable ‘unlawful employment practice.’” Id. at 114.

Second, although plaintiffs may invoke the continuing violations

doctrine for claims that by their nature occur not “on any

particular day” but “over a series of days or perhaps years,” they

must allege that at least one “act contributing to the claim

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occur[red] within the filing period.” Id. at 115, 117 (describing

continuing violations doctrine requirements in context of hostile

work environment claim). With these two Morgan limitations

in mind, we turn to Mayers’s three substantive claims. 

First, the district court found that Mayers had not been

discriminated against because LHSFNA provided her electric

tools, “albeit slowly,” and because she never requested light

duty. 404 F. Supp. 2d at 61. As to the first point, we doubt that

a three-year delay in accommodating a plaintiff’s disability is

not actionable under the ADA. ADA accommodations must be

“reasonable,” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(b)(5)(A), and we are unsure

how a long-delayed accommodation could be considered

reasonable. We need not resolve this issue, however, for we can

affirm summary judgment for LHSFNA on Mayers’s failure-toaccommodate claim based on the first Morgan limitation.

LHSFNA’s failure to provide the electric tools was a discrete act

of discrimination that ended, at the latest, in June 2000 when

LHSFNA provided the requested equipment—well outside the

180-day period leading up to her EEOC complaint. Thus,

although we think it likely that Mayers has presented sufficient

evidence of pre-September 2000 discrimination to survive

summary judgment, her failure to exhaust her administrative

remedies precludes a finding of liability. The same holds true

for Mayers’s claim that she was discriminated against by not

being placed on light duty, as the record contains no evidence

that she requested such duty in the period after September 13,

2000. 

 Mayers’s retaliation claim suffers from a similar defect. To

make out a prima facie case of retaliation, an ADA plaintiff

must show “first, that she ‘engaged in protected activity’;

second, that she ‘was subjected to adverse action by the

employer’; and third, that ‘there existed a causal link between

the adverse action and the protected activity.’” Smith, 430 F.3d

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at 455 (citation omitted). Mayers points to a smorgasbord of

allegedly retaliatory acts, some of which are merely her

discrimination claims with new labeling—for instance, she

alleges that LHSFNA’s retaliation included “[the] failure to put

her on light duty as ordered by her physician,” Appellant’s Br.

19—and others that find no support in the record, e.g., her

assertion that LHSFNA “fail[ed] to consider her requests for

transfer to a position in which she could work with less physical

pain,” id. Her only potentially viable claim is that LHSFNA

increased her workload and tightened her deadlines in retaliation

for her seeking reasonable accommodation for her arthritis. In

support of this claim, Mayers testified at her deposition that

LHSFNA upped her workload after providing her with electric

tools in the spring or early summer of 2000. Ordinarily, such

testimony might suffice to defeat summary judgment on a

retaliation claim, but here it shows only that Mayers may have

been retaliated against outside the actionable 180-day period.

Mayers, of course, has exhausted her administrative

remedies with respect to her claim that the LHSFNA retaliated

against her in connection with the January 2001 brochure

project. That claim, however, fails on the merits. To begin

with, Mayers does not allege that the project increased her

workload above and beyond what ordinarily was expected of

her. In fact, although Mayers says that she anticipated the

project would be finished by someone else while she was on

vacation, she nowhere claims that LHSFNA ordered her to

complete it on her own when she returned. Mayers has thus

failed to allege an adverse action. Even if the project did qualify

as an adverse action, summary judgment was nonetheless

appropriate because Mayers failed to establish a causal

connection between the project and her requests for reasonable

accommodation. Although causation can sometimes be inferred

by temporal proximity, see, e.g., Singletary, 351 F.3d at 525

(“[T]his circuit has held that a close temporal relationship may

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alone establish the required causal connection.”), the eight- or

nine-month gap between the final protected activity—either the

physician’s March 2000 letter or Mayers’s April 2000

conversation with the Assistant Executive Director—and the

early January 2001 project is far too long, see Clark County Sch.

Dist. v. Breeden, 532 U.S. 270, 273-74 (2001) (per curiam)

(citing with approval circuit cases rejecting temporal proximity

of three and four months as evidence of causation).

We arrive finally at Mayers’s constructive discharge claim.

The district court acknowledged Mayers’s allegation that “she

was forced to find a new job because of the hostile work

environment,” but concluded that “Ms. Mayers voluntarily left

her employment with LHSFNA.” 404 F. Supp. 2d at 61. In

reaching this conclusion, the district court relied on the letter

Mayers sent applying for her new job, which stated that “her

reason for leaving LHSFNA was ‘advancement.’” Id. The

district court also ruled that “notwithstanding [Mayers’s]

contention in her resignation letter that LHSFNA required her to

perform tasks despite advice from her doctor that she be placed

on light duty, the evidence shows that no such accommodation

was specifically requested by Ms. Mayers.” Id. But the

resignation letter plainly qualifies as evidence, and the district

court’s weighing of it against the application letter had no place

in summary judgment proceedings. See Arrington v. United

States, 473 F.3d 329, 335-38 (D.C. Cir. 2006).

Nonetheless, the district court correctly concluded that

Mayers’s constructive discharge claim cannot survive summary

judgment. We have not yet had occasion to say whether, after

Morgan, constructive discharge claims (like hostile work

environment claims) by their “very nature involve[] repeated

conduct,” and are thus amenable to continuing violations

analysis. Morgan, 536 U.S. at 115. Assuming that they do,

Morgan’s second limiting principle bars Mayers’s claim.

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Morgan requires that Mayers show one offending act within the

statutory period and, as this court recently noted, constructive

discharge claims “must be predicated on a showing of either

intentional discrimination, or retaliation.” Carter v. George

Washington Univ., 387 F.3d 872, 883 (D.C. Cir. 2004) (internal

citation omitted). Because Mayers has failed to identify a single

act of discrimination or retaliation within the 180-day period,

her constructive discharge claim fails as a matter of law. 

We affirm the grant of summary judgment in favor of

LHSFNA.

So ordered.

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