Opinion ID: 42765
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: “Special Circumstances” Under Barnett

Text: The ADA broadly proscribes discriminatory employment practices against persons with a disability, providing that “[n]o covered entity shall discriminate against a qualified individual with a disability because of the disability of such individual in regard to job application procedures, the hiring, advancement, or discharge of employees, employee compensation, job training, and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment.” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(a). A “qualified individual with a disability” is one “who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such individual holds or desires.” Id. § 12111(8). A “reasonable accommodation” may include “part-time or modified work schedules, reassignment to a vacant position, . . . and other similar accommodations for individuals with disabilities.” Id. § 12111(9)(B). Finally, the ADA says that “discrimination” includes an employer’s “not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified . . . employee, unless [the employer] can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation of [its] business.” Id. § 12112(b)(5)(A). -7- Given the largely undisputed factual circumstances, our task on this appeal is particularly narrow. The parties stipulated that (1) the City is an “employer” within the meaning of that term under the ADA; (2) Medrano is “disabled” under the ADA; and (3) Medrano could perform the essential functions of the parking attendant job with a shift accommodation that would allow him to use VIAtrans to commute to and from work. But for the conflict with the terms of the seniority policy, the parties agree that Medrano’s request for a first-shift accommodation was reasonable. Therefore, just as the district court did in its order granting judgment as a matter of law, we shall focus our attention on whether, despite the conflict with the seniority policy, a reasonable jury could find that the City was required to hire Medrano as a full-time parking attendant with the first-shift accommodation. To answer this question, the district court examined the Supreme Court’s decision in US Airways, Inc. v. Barnett, 535 U.S. 391 (2002). In Barnett, the Court confronted a very similar issue, albeit in the context of summary judgment, to the one presented in this case: How does the ADA resolve a conflict between the interests of a disabled worker seeking assignment to a particular position as a “reasonable accommodation” and the interests of other employees with superior bidding rights under an employer’s seniority system? Id. at 393. In applying the relevant statutory provisions outlined above, the Court first -8- “reconciled the phrases ‘reasonable accommodation’ and ‘undue hardship’ in a practical way.” Id. at 401. To defeat an employer’s motion for summary judgment, the employee “need only show that an ‘accommodation’ seems reasonable on its face, i.e., ordinarily or in the run of cases.” Id. Once the employee makes this showing, the employer “then must show special (typically case-specific) circumstances that demonstrate undue hardship in the particular circumstances.” Id. at 402. The Court held that an employer need not demonstrate on a case-by-case basis that its seniority system should prevail over an otherwise reasonable accommodation request.7 Id. at 403 (“[I]t would not be reasonable in the run of cases that the assignment in question trump the rules of a seniority system. To the contrary, it will ordinarily be unreasonable for the assignment to prevail.”). The Court, however, also adopted a fact-intensive exception to this general rule that permits a court to find that “special circumstances” trump a seniority policy in certain circumstances. Id. at 405 (noting that an employee “remains free to show that special circumstances warrant a finding that, despite the presence of a seniority system (which the ADA may not trump in the run of cases), the requested ‘accommodation’ is ‘reasonable’ 7 Moreover, the Court expressly stated that the relevant advantages of seniority systems “are not limited to collectively bargained systems.” Barnett, 535 U.S. at 404. Therefore, the Court declined to treat a seniority system that had been unilaterally imposed by an employer any differently on this basis. Id. -9- on the particular facts”). The opinion briefly discussed two illustrative, though by no means exhaustive, examples of “special circumstances” that might trump an otherwise valid seniority policy: The plaintiff might show, for example, that the employer, having retained the right to change the seniority system unilaterally, exercises that right fairly frequently, reducing employee expectations that the system will be followed--to the point where one more departure, needed to accommodate an individual with a disability, will not likely make a difference. The plaintiff might show that the system already contains exceptions such that, in the circumstances, one further exception is unlikely to matter. Id. On appeal, Medrano challenges only the district court’s adverse ruling regarding his ADA failure-to-accommodate claim because he contends there was sufficient evidence in the record to establish “special circumstances” such that the shift accommodation he sought from the City was a reasonable one.8 Before proceeding to a substantive discussion of the “special circumstances” exception, the district court first addressed the 8 In his opening brief, Medrano also challenged the district court’s judgment in favor of the City on his ADA claims of unlawful preemployment inquiry. We need not consider this issue, however, because Medrano expressly waived it in his reply brief to this court. See Crutcher v. Aetna Life Ins. Co., 746 F.2d 1076, 1080 (5th Cir. 1984). We also decline to separately address the district court’s grant of judgment as a matter of law on Medrano’s retaliation claim because Medrano does not separately argue that issue in this appeal. See Hall v. Thomas, 190 F.3d 693, 697 n.2 (5th Cir. 1999) (noting that appellant had abandoned certain arguments by failing to discuss them in his brief). -10- relevant time period in which to examine the City’s seniority policy. The Court must determine the scope of the seniority system in order to assess whether “special circumstances” necessitated a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. Here, the seniority system might include the entire history of the program; or given management’s change in policy, the relevant seniority system might include the time of the policy change in 2000 to the date of trial. The Barnett Court stressed the importance of maintaining a seniority system that meets employees’ expectations of consistent, uniform treatment. Employees understandably rely on the policies in place at the time of their employment. Because Defendant’s employees were notified of the change in seniority policy as of Defendant’s January 21, 2000 memo, the Court will confine its analysis to the employer’s most recent policy. Therefore, Plaintiff’s claims will be considered only as to any exceptions made following February 4, 2000 when Plaintiff was terminated under the new policy. Medrano, 2004 WL 2550592, at . Medrano argues that the district court erred in focusing exclusively on the application of the seniority policy after the City eliminated the part-time parking attendant positions and thereby disregarding the shift accommodations made to him during his tenure as a part-time parking attendant. Medrano insists that the elimination of the part-time parking attendant positions on February 4, 2000 did not otherwise affect the seniority policy. From this premise, Medrano next contends that the district court failed to properly account for the impact of Medrano’s previous first-shift assignments on his fellow employees. He maintains that the “common theme” in both examples of the “special circumstances” exception under Barnett is the -11- impact of the accommodation on co-workers’ expectations. Citing witness testimony in the record, Medrano asserts that his coworkers neither objected to nor complained about his first-shift accommodation during his tenure as a part-time parking attendant for the City. Finally, he argues that the district court improperly applied a mathematical formula to determine whether the accommodations granted to Medrano were reasonable as a matter of law. According to Medrano, the fact-intensive “special circumstances” inquiry is uniquely suited for determination by a jury. The City responds that the district court correctly applied Barnett in ruling as a matter of law that the evidence was legally insufficient to support the jury’s verdict. First, the City argues that a different seniority system was created when it eliminated all part-time parking attendant positions, and the district court correctly focused on this new system in granting judgment as a matter of law for the City. Moreover, the City maintains that Medrano’s reliance on the absence of complaints in the witness testimony misconstrues the focus on co-worker expectations under the “special circumstances” exception of Barnett. In order to prove the existence of “special circumstances” under the first example in Barnett, the City contends that Medrano would have to demonstrate that “fairly frequent” deviations from the seniority policy left employees with no real expectation that the seniority policy would be -12- enforced. Finally, the City argues that Medrano could not demonstrate that one more exception was “unlikely to matter” pursuant to the second example of the “special circumstances” exception in Barnett because there was no evidence of any deviations from the seniority policy. We agree with the district court that the proper focus of its “special circumstances” was on the seniority policy as it applied after the part-time positions were eliminated on February 4, 2000. Medrano does correctly point out that the actual terms of the seniority policy itself did not change when the part-time positions were eliminated. We fail to see how this distinction undermines the district court’s analysis. The simple fact remains that, although Medrano consistently received a firstshift assignment during his prior employment as a part-time parking attendant, he never received such an accommodation as a full-time parking attendant once the City eliminated the parttime position on February 4, 2000. In fact, he was never hired as a full-time parking attendant. During oral argument, Medrano insisted that the separate job classifications were immaterial to the Barnett analysis because he performed the same duties and worked the same hours as his full-time counterparts. We find this argument unconvincing. The positions of “Parking Toll Attendant/Full Time” and “Parking Toll Attendant/Part Time” constitute separate job classifications under the City’s seniority policy. The policy defines -13- “seniority” as the “length of service within an employee’s current job classification and department.” The policy plainly states that “[t]he assignment to a shift will be by seniority during the bid process.” Moreover, Medrano stipulated that he did not accumulate seniority for the position of “Parking Toll Attendant/Full Time” based on his previous employment with the City as a “Parking Toll Attendant/Part Time.” In light of the clear terms of the seniority policy and the stipulated facts in this case, we conclude that job classification is in fact a critical component of this seniority system’s bidding process. See, e.g., Dobbs v. City of Atlanta, 606 F.2d 557, 558 (5th Cir. 1979) (describing, in the context of a similar seniority bidding procedure, how an employee who transfers to a different position within a department “must forfeit all the competitive seniority he has accumulated in his previous bargaining unit and start at the bottom”). Therefore, we conclude that the district court correctly focused its analysis on the seniority policy as it applied after the parttime positions were eliminated on February 4, 2000. Having so concluded, our review of the district court’s analysis is greatly simplified. Both examples of “special circumstances” under Barnett examine whether deviations from a seniority policy--either when an employer exercises its right unilaterally to change the system “fairly frequently” or when the system itself “already contains exceptions”--reduce the -14- expectations of employees “that the system will be followed” such that “one further exception is unlikely to matter.” Barnett, 535 U.S. at 405. The crucial and inescapable shortcoming of Medrano’s attempt to establish “special circumstances” is that the record is conspicuously devoid of a single instance in which an exception was made for an employee in the full-time parking attendant job classification in violation of the City’s seniority policy. See Medrano, 2004 WL 2550592, at -5 (“Because the Court only looks to the most recent seniority policy, insufficient evidence was presented as a matter of law for it to find special circumstances existed . . . .”).9 The district court’s conclusion on this point is entirely correct. Moreover, this court’s decision in Foreman v. Babcock & 9 Although we agree that co-worker impact is the touchstone of the “special circumstances” analysis under Barnett, Medrano’s citations to testimony from co-workers responding to his firstshift accommodation while he was employed as a part-time parking attendant are simply irrelevant to this inquiry. Because Medrano did not identify a single relevant exception, we need not, and do not, reach the issue of what precise evidentiary threshold might demonstrate that an employer exercised its right to deviate from the seniority policy “fairly frequently” under Barnett. We also agree with the district court that Medrano’s reliance on the Federal Circuit’s decision in Office of the Architect of the Capitol v. Office of Compliance, 361 F.3d 633 (Fed. Cir. 2004), was misplaced. In that case, the court located substantial evidence in the record “of the numerous exceptions to, and overall fluidity of, [the Office of the Architect]’s wage grade classification system” to conclude that “one more exception” was unlikely to matter. Id. Again, Medrano’s inability to introduce any evidence of such flexibility in the City’s seniority policy with respect to full-time parking attendants ultimately doomed his effort to establish “special circumstances” under Barnett. -15- Wilcox Co., 117 F.3d 800 (5th Cir. 1997), cert. denied, 522 U.S. 1115 (1998), presented a similar conflict between a reasonable accommodation request under the ADA and the terms of a collectively bargained seniority policy. Initially, we note that Foreman took place in exactly the same procedural posture as this case--namely, an appeal from a judgment as a matter of law in favor of the employer. Id. at 802. As in the instant matter, the employee in Foreman conceded that the requested work accommodation for his heart condition would violate the terms of the seniority policy. Id. at 809. In affirming the district court’s grant of judgment as a matter of law, this court expressly rejected the argument that an employer’s duty to accommodate an employee’s disability under the ADA trumped the employer’s obligation to honor the collectively bargained seniority policy. Id. at 810. “Following other circuits which have considered this issue, we hold that the ADA does not require an employer to take action inconsistent with the contractual rights of other workers under a collective bargaining agreement.” Id. (citing Benson v. Northwest Airlines, Inc., 62 F.3d 1108, 1114 (8th Cir. 1995); Eckles v. Consol. Rail Corp., 94 F.3d 1041, 1051 (7th Cir. 1996); Milton v. Scrivner, Inc., 53 F.3d 1118, 1125 (10th Cir. 1995)). Based on our close review of this court’s decision in Foreman, -16- the Supreme Court’s subsequent holding in Barnett,10 and the record in this case, we conclude that a reasonable jury could not find in favor of Medrano on his failure-to-accommodate claim.