Opinion ID: 72200
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Salary Continuation Program

Text: 15 While Plaintiff admits he was unable to return to work when Defendant terminated his employment, Plaintiff says that, as a reasonable accommodation, Defendant was required to allow Plaintiff to exhaust the remaining two months of benefits under its Salary Continuation Program. In support of this argument, Plaintiff points to the Appendix to C.F.R. § 1630.2(o) (other accommodations could include permitting the use of accrued paid leave or providing additional unpaid leave for necessary treatment). 16 That Defendant, as a matter of business policy, chose to create its Salary Continuation Plan does not establish that it was required to allow Plaintiff to receive benefits under the plan--for an entire year--as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. See, e.g., Myers v. Hose, 50 F.3d 278, 284 (4th Cir.1995) ([The employee's] reliance on the [employer's] [p]ersonnel [r]ules as proof of the alleged failure to provide reasonable accommodation is misplaced. A particular accommodation is not necessarily reasonable, and thus federally mandated, simply because the [employer] elects to establish it as a matter of policy.)Assuming that the regulations contemplate that an employee be allowed benefits of the kind in Defendants' Salary Continuation Plan, Plaintiff acknowledges that his need for leave would have been for an indefinite period--not just a month or two. Put differently, Plaintiff could not represent that he likely would have been able to work within a month or two. Plaintiff had already been on medical leave for ten months, had only two months of eligibility for the Salary Continuation Plan remaining, and had no way of knowing when his doctor would allow him to return to work in any capacity. 17 In an analogous situation, the Fourth Circuit held that an employer did not violate the ADA by refusing to grant [an employee] a period of time in which to cure his disabilities where the employee sets no temporal limit on the advocated grace period, urging only that he deserves sufficient time to ameliorate his conditions. Id. at 282. In so holding, the Myers court said these words: 18 Significantly, these provisions [42 U.S.C. § 12111(8); 45 C.F.R. § 1232.3(i) ] contain no reference to a person's future ability to perform the essential functions of his position. To the contrary, they are formulated entirely in the present tense, framing the precise issue as to whether an individual can (not will be able to) perform the job with reasonable accommodations. Nothing in the text of the reasonable accommodation provision requires an employer to wait for an indefinite period for an accommodation to achieve its intended effect. Rather, reasonable accommodation is by its terms most logically construed as that which, presently, or in the immediate future, enables the employee to perform the essential functions of the job in question. 19 Id. at 283. In a similar way, Plaintiff's request that his employer accommodate any disability Plaintiff had by providing him with two more months leave when he could not show he would likely be then able to labor is not reasonable within the meaning of the ADA: the course of Plaintiff's health was too uncertain. 2 20 AFFIRMED.