Court Opinion

ID: 9369420
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-02-08 20:00:32.034634+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:14.936911
License: Public Domain

USCA11 Case: 22-11395    Document: 25-1      Date Filed: 02/08/2023    Page: 1 of 10

                                                    [DO NOT PUBLISH]
                                    In the
                 United States Court of Appeals
                         For the Eleventh Circuit

                           ____________________

                                 No. 22-11395
                           Non-Argument Calendar
                           ____________________

        SCOTTIE LEWIS,
                                                       Plaintiff-Appellant,
        versus
        GEORGIA POWER COMPANY,

                                                     Defendant-Appellee,
                           ____________________

                  Appeal from the United States District Court
                      for the Middle District of Georgia
                     D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cv-00173-LAG
                           ____________________
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        2                      Opinion of the Court               22-11395

        Before NEWSOM, GRANT, and LUCK, Circuit Judges.
        PER CURIAM:
               Scottie Lewis appeals the summary judgment for his former
        employer, Georgia Power Co., on his discrimination and retalia-
        tion claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act. We affirm.
            FACTUAL BACKGROUND AND PROCEDURAL HISTORY
               Lewis began working as a lineman at Georgia Power in
        2001, and he held that same position until his termination in 2019.
        He also suffers from monocular vision: he has been blind in his
        right eye since the age of five. Lewis’s condition didn’t affect his
        ability to perform his work normally, but it did mean that he
        needed a medical examiner’s certification, plus a federal vision
        waiver, to obtain a commercial driver’s license (CDL). Georgia
        Power required all of its linemen to have a valid CDL to drive its
        company vehicles. To keep his CDL valid, Lewis needed to submit
        paperwork for his federal vision waiver every two years.
               Georgia Power considered a CDL as “essential” to a line-
        man’s job functions. Linemen did not necessarily drive a commer-
        cial vehicle every day, and whether any particular lineman needed
        to do so was “unpredictable.” It was uncommon that all four mem-
        bers of a line crew would need to drive vehicles to a job site. But
        various conditions could increase the need for more drivers: bro-
        ken electric poles, multiple simultaneous failures, severe storms,
        and the like. Lewis drove both a pickup truck and commercial ve-
        hicles as a lineman, but he only drove the commercial vehicles
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        22-11395               Opinion of the Court                       3

        around four days per month. Still, Georgia Power required a valid
        CDL for linemen to drive even non-commercial vehicles, including
        a pickup truck, while on duty. Its policy permitted reasonable ac-
        commodations for a lineman who lost his CDL due to medical cir-
        cumstances. But Georgia Power would not offer modified job du-
        ties to an employee after more than one loss of a CDL for a non-
        medical reason.
                In 2007, Lewis’s CDL was suspended following a traffic cita-
        tion for driving under the influence of alcohol. Ten years later, in
        2017, he lost his CDL for thirty days while he waited for the gov-
        ernment to approve the paperwork he’d submitted to renew his
        federal vision exemption. He asked Georgia Power to accommo-
        date him while his vision exemption was processed, and Georgia
        Power permitted him to work without driving a company vehicle
        for thirty days until his CDL was reinstated. Beverly Turner—then
        the supervisor of Georgia Power’s disability management depart-
        ment—helped Lewis fill out the accommodation paperwork, and
        she categorized his accommodation request as related to a medical
        circumstance.
               In 2019, Lewis’s vision exemption expired again—automati-
        cally suspending his CDL—because he didn’t submit paperwork in
        time for it to be approved. The day his CDL expired, Lewis asked
        his supervisor for the same accommodation he’d requested in
        2017—to work without driving until his CDL was reinstated. This
        time, when Ms. Turner reviewed Lewis’s application for an accom-
        modation, she told Lewis’s supervisor that the failure to timely
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        4                      Opinion of the Court                22-11395

        submit paperwork was not a medical issue. Georgia Power’s labor
        relations supervisor reviewed Lewis’s files and determined that
        Lewis’s 2017 accommodation had been “mishandled” as a medical
        issue because he lost his license for submitting paperwork too late,
        not because of his monocular vision. Lewis’s supervisor and other
        management then decided to terminate Lewis; his termination let-
        ter stated that he was being discharged for failing to maintain a
        valid CDL for non-medical reasons in 2007, 2017, and 2019.
                Lewis sued Georgia Power in 2019. He alleged that Georgia
        Power had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act through
        failure to reasonably accommodate his disability (count one), in-
        tentional discrimination on the basis of disability (count two), and
        retaliation against his request for an accommodation (count three).
        After discovery ended, Georgia Power moved for summary judg-
        ment.
                The district court granted summary judgment for Georgia
        Power. As to the intentional-discrimination and reasonable-ac-
        commodation claims, the district court concluded that Lewis was
        not a “qualified individual.” To be a qualified individual under the
        Americans with Disabilities Act, Lewis had to present summary
        judgment evidence that, with or without a reasonable accommo-
        dation, he could perform the essential functions of his job. But, the
        district court explained, the summary judgment evidence showed
        that having a valid CDL was an essential function of Lewis’s line-
        man job. His “failure to maintain his CDL made him unqualified
        for the position at the time of his termination.”
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        22-11395               Opinion of the Court                         5

                As to the retaliation claim, the district court concluded that
        Lewis’s “adverse employment action—his termination—was
        caused not by a request for an accommodation, but by his own fail-
        ure timely to submit his vision exemption paperwork.” Lewis, the
        district court explained, “admitted during his deposition that he
        was not terminated in retaliation for requesting an accommoda-
        tion.”
              Lewis appealed the summary judgment for Georgia Power.
                            STANDARD OF REVIEW
               We review de novo the district court’s grant of summary
        judgment, viewing the record in the light most favorable to the
        nonmoving party. Owens v. Governor’s Off. of Student Achieve-
        ment, 52 F.4th 1327, 1333 (11th Cir. 2022). Summary judgment is
        appropriate where “there is no genuine dispute as to any material
        fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.”
        Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a).
                                   DISCUSSION
               Lewis alleged three counts in his complaint—(1) failure to
        accommodate his disability, (2) intentional discrimination against
        his disability, and (3) retaliatory discharge—all in violation of the
        Americans with Disabilities Act. We address the discrimination
        claims together first, then turn to the retaliation claim.
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        6                       Opinion of the Court                   22-11395

                                    Discrimination
               The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits employers
        from taking adverse employment action “against a qualified indi-
        vidual on the basis of disability.” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(a). An em-
        ployer can violate section 12112(a) either by intentional discrimi-
        nation or by failing to make a reasonable accommodation for an
        employee’s disability. Id. § 12112(b)(5)(A); Lucas v. W.W. Grain-
        ger, Inc., 257 F.3d 1249, 1255 (11th Cir. 2001). Under either theory
        of discrimination, a plaintiff must show that “he was a ‘qualified
        individual’ at the relevant time, meaning he could perform the es-
        sential functions of the job in question with or without reasonable
        accommodations.” Id. (citing Reed v. Heil Co., 206 F.3d 1055, 1061
        (11th Cir. 2000). “If the individual is unable to perform an essential
        function of his job, even with an accommodation, he is, by defini-
        tion, not a ‘qualified individual’ and, therefore, not covered under
        the ADA.” Holly v. Clairson Indus., 492 F.3d 1247 (11th Cir. 2007)
        (quoting D’Angelo v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 422 F.3d 1220, 1229
        (11th Cir. 2005)).
               “Whether a function is essential is evaluated on a case-by-
        case basis by examining a number of factors.” Lewis v. City of Un-
        ion City, 934 F.3d 1169, 1182 (11th Cir. 2019) (quoting D’Angelo,
        422 F.3d at 1230). Those factors include “the employer’s judgment
        of whether a particular function is essential,” id., as well as: a “writ-
        ten job description prepared before . . . interviewing applicants for
        the job; the amount of time spent on the job performing the func-
        tion; the consequences of not requiring the employee to perform
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        22-11395               Opinion of the Court                        7

        the function”; and whether the requirement applies to “past em-
        ployees in the job” or “employees in similar jobs.” Id. (quoting
        Sampson v. Fed. Exp. Corp., 746 F.3d 1196, 1201 (11th Cir. 2014));
        see also 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(n)(3).
               A job function can be essential even if an employer insists on
        it merely to improve its responsiveness to customers’ needs. In
        Davis v. Florida Power & Light Co., for example, the plaintiff
        worked for a power company that required its technicians to work
        overtime when necessary to restore power outages the same day
        they occurred. 205 F.3d 1301, 1303 (11th Cir. 2000). The plaintiff
        had suffered a back injury and sought a light duty schedule where
        he didn’t need to work overtime, but the power company sus-
        pended him for refusing to work the extra hours. Id. at 1304. We
        held that the plaintiff was not a qualified individual under the
        Americans with Disabilities Act because the ability to work over-
        time was an essential function of his job: the plaintiff agreed to it
        as a job requirement when he hired on, the power company relied
        on unpredictable overtime work to guarantee customers a same-
        day power restoration, and overtime work comprised a “substan-
        tial amount” of employees’ schedules. Id. at 1305. Because over-
        time was necessary to fulfill the plaintiff’s job requirements, we
        concluded that refusing to work overtime essentially amounted to
        refusing to show up for work. Id. at 1306.
              Here, having a CDL was an essential function of Lewis’s
        lineman job. Like the overtime requirement in Davis, Georgia
        Power’s company policy required its linemen to have a valid CDL.
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        8                      Opinion of the Court                 22-11395

        And, while driving a company vehicle was not necessary every day,
        it still comprised a “substantial amount” of Lewis’s job—some ten
        to twenty hours per week, and roughly four days per month driv-
        ing a commercial vehicle that Georgia law required a CDL to op-
        erate. Cf. Davis, 205 F.3d at 1305 (holding that two hundred hours
        of annual overtime—less than twenty hours per month—consti-
        tuted a “substantial amount” that weighed in favor of overtime be-
        ing an essential job function). As in Davis, Lewis’s supervisor tes-
        tified that it was unpredictable when all four linemen on a crew
        team would need to operate a vehicle at a job site. Finally, if a crew
        member didn’t have a CDL when he needed to drive, he needed to
        be replaced with another crew member, so the consequences of
        Lewis’s lack of a CDL meant that Georgia Power would need to
        pay someone else to cover for him. The district court correctly
        concluded that having a CDL was an essential function of Lewis’s
        job.
                Lewis argues that having a CDL was not an essential job
        function because he mostly drove a pickup truck, which he did not
        need a CDL to do under Georgia law. He doesn’t dispute that
        Georgia Power required a CDL for him to drive its pickup trucks,
        but he contends this requirement was “arbitrary” and thus not es-
        sential. But, as the district court correctly noted, “[f]ederal courts
        do not sit as a super-personnel department that reexamines an en-
        tity’s business decisions.” Chapman v. AI Transp., 229 F.3d 1012,
        1030 (11th Cir. 2000) (quoting Elrod v. Sears, Roebuck & Co., 939
        F.2d 1466, 1470 (11th Cir. 1991) (marks omitted)). Lewis doesn’t
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        22-11395               Opinion of the Court                        9

        argue that Georgia Power’s CDL requirement was itself discrimi-
        natory, and he wasn’t a “qualified employee” under the Americans
        with Disabilities Act when he was terminated. See Davis, 205 F.3d
        at 1305. The district court did not err in granting summary judg-
        ment on Lewis’s intentional-discrimination and reasonable-accom-
        modation claims.
                                    Retaliation
                In addition to prohibiting discrimination, the Americans
        with Disabilities Act protects disabled employees from retaliation
        on the basis of “oppos[ing] any act or practice made unlawful by”
        the Act. 42 U.S.C. § 12203(a). “To establish a prima facie case of
        retaliation, a plaintiff must show: (1) statutorily protected expres-
        sion; (2) adverse employment action; and (3) a causal link between
        the protected expression and the adverse action.” Stewart v.
        Happy Herman’s Cheshire Bridge, Inc., 117 F.3d 1278, 1287 (11th
        Cir. 1997) (emphasis omitted).
                We agree with the district court that there’s no genuine dis-
        pute that Lewis’s request for an accommodation was not the cause
        of his termination. Lewis admitted in his deposition that he was
        fired not because he requested an accommodation but because he
        could not get his paperwork in on time to renew his CDL. Lewis
        testified that he was not “terminated because [he] asked for more
        time to get [his] paperwork in.” Instead, Lewis agreed, he was “ter-
        minated because [he] couldn’t get [his] paperwork in.” Because
        Lewis hasn’t shown a genuine dispute that his request for an
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        10                  Opinion of the Court             22-11395

        accommodation caused his termination, he hasn’t shown a prima
        facie case of retaliation.
              AFFIRMED.