Latest Disability Cases Demonstrate Challenges Facing Staffing Firms

This week's disability cases come to us courtesy of Addeco USA and Vaco Nashville, each of whom find themselves a target of Federal Court disability lawsuits, along with their clients. In each case, the actions of the clients are the immediate source of the claims. Yet as is usually the case, the staffing firm was sued as well. And if the staffing firms were not diligent in reviewing and negotiating their client contracts, they could find themselves having to indemnify the clients for the clients' own actions.  

In the Vaco case, the allegation against the staffing firm was failure to place the candidate elsewhere after the client terminated him, allegedly because of his disabilities. The disabilities asserted by the plaintiff are "Bipolar Disorder II, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Chronic Depression." According to the Complaint, the client supervisor discharged him because the company "needed bright and happy people." For good measure, the plaintiff in another count alleges sexual orientation discrimination.

In the Addeco case, the asserted disability is "peripheral neuropathy." The plaintiff requested accommodations, including a parking spot closer to the facility and a three-wheeled bike for navigating around the facility. The accommodations were allegedly not provided by the client, and the plaintiff was ultimately terminated. The Complaint also alleges that both the client and Addeco failed to engage in the interactive reasonable accommodation process, a common basis for bringing staffing firms into assigned employee disability claims.

These cases illustrate the extreme difficulty faced by staffing firms in complying with disability laws. The staffing firm has no control over the client's disability accommodation process or decisions. And the staffing firm may not always be able to re-deploy a candidate, particularly one who has been terminated a by a client under circumstances that the firm is not fully aware of.

The best approach for mitigating this risk is to ensure that your front-line employees, those dealing with the assigned workers, are trained to raise a red flag with your human resource and/or legal teams when they get wind of a disability controversy in the making. There are things that can (and should) be done in these situations to comply with the law and provide the firm with defenses to a claim. Most important is to be an advocate for a disabled worker with the client. This doesn't mean taking sides. Rather, the record should reflect that the staffing firm engaged in the interactive accommodation process with the worker and client, including making sure that the client's human resource team gets involved. In many cases, that will be expected of the staffing firm legally.