ADA Accommodations After a Car Crash

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By: Bill Henry
PublishedJul 16, 2020
2 minute read

You may need to take time off from work if you’re injured in a car crash. You also may need additional accommodations from your employer while you recover. The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, may be useful for you if you sustained a concussion or other injures in a car accident.

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Understanding the Americans with Disabilities Act

What Employers are Required to Provide

So the ADA requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees who are disabled. So there’s a lot to unpack there.

So a covered employer is an employer who has 15 or more employees. So any employer who has 15 or more employees, they are governed by this ADA.

Your disability has to be quote a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. One of those major life activities is working. So you have to have a disability. You have to tell your employer you have a disability under the ADA and that you are requesting accommodation.

Accommodations You Can Request

More Time Off

So, and again this may just be a temporary situation, so maybe your FMLA has run out, those 12 weeks have run out, but you need an extension.

And if your employer is large enough maybe it would be reasonable to accommodate that extension of a request for leave and so maybe your request for accommodation under the ADA is another six weeks of leave or another 12 weeks of leave.

Again, it’s just job protection. It’s not income benefits, it’s just job protection.

Changes at Your Office

If you don’t need an extension of leave, maybe you need accommodation of a reduced workload, reduced work hours, flexible work schedule, work from home part-time. You know, extended breaks during the day to give your brain time to rest.

Your restrictions from having too much screen time with the computer or environmental restrictions or accommodations like, you know, a request to move to a different part of the office that is less noisy so that you have less of the outside stimuli or a darker office or an area that you can turn the lights off.

You can also request things like restricted access to customers or coworkers. Just to kinda calm everything down while you reenter the workforce.

Reasonable Employee Requests

So a request a reasonable unless it would impose an undue hardship on the employer. So an undue hardship is defined as an action requiring significant difficulty or expense when considered in light of certain factors. Lots of attorney stuff here. Reasonable and factors and considerations.

How Courts Determine Reasonableness

So some of the considerations that courts look at to determine if a request for accommodation was reasonable are the size of the company, the type of the industry, the number of employees in the same position, and the cost of the accommodation.

The ADA Takeaway

So the bottom line is in order for you to be protected under ADA you have to be able to perform the essential functions of the position once the reasonable accommodation that you’re requesting is provided. If you even upon the accommodation cannot perform your job duties you don’t have job protection and your employer can let you go.

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If you have a question about any of the content above or need help with your personal injury, please call us at 303-688-0944 to begin your case assessment with a member of our Personal Injury Team.

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