Accommodation Requests in a Physically Demanding Trade

Why this matters

Generic accommodation advice is written for an office, where "adjust the workstation" answers most of it. In a trade, the job genuinely involves ladders, attics, crawlspaces and weight, so an owner reads the same advice and concludes the law cannot possibly mean what it says. It does mean it, and the thing that decides these cases is a document almost no shop has: a written description of what the job actually requires, written before anybody got hurt.

This is orientation, not legal advice about your own situation. There are two points below where the right move is a phone call, and they are marked.

Who is covered, and the threshold nobody expects

The Americans with Disabilities Act reaches an employer with fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year (42 U.S.C. 12111(5)(A)). That is the federal floor and it is the number most owners have heard.

The state layer is where small shops get caught, because state disability statutes routinely reach further down. New York's Human Rights Law reaches employers of any size after its 2019 amendments; California's Fair Employment and Housing Act reaches five or more employees for discrimination and every employer for harassment; Michigan and Colorado reach an employer with one employee. Several states also define disability more broadly than the ADA does. A nine-person shop that concludes it is exempt because it is under fifteen has answered only the federal half of the question.

Two more travel with this. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (enacted 2022, effective June 2023, same fifteen-employee threshold) goes further than the ADA in one respect a trade shop will meet: it contemplates temporarily suspending an essential function, which the ADA does not. And the 2008 ADA Amendments Act widened who counts as disabled - conditions are assessed without regard to mitigating measures other than ordinary glasses, and an episodic condition counts if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active. Owners working from what they learned before 2008 are working from law that was overruled by statute.

Essential functions, and the document the statute names

An accommodation is only owed for the essential functions of the job. So the fight is almost always about which functions are essential, and the statute tells you exactly what it will look at.

42 U.S.C. 12111(8) says consideration shall be given to the employer's judgment, and that a written job description prepared before advertising or interviewing for the position is evidence of the essential functions. Read that timing again. A description written the week after a restriction lands is not excluded, but it reads as constructed, and it is worth a fraction of one that has been sitting in the hiring file for four years.

The regulation at 29 CFR 1630.2(n) fills in the rest. A function may be essential because the position exists to perform it, because only a limited number of employees are available to absorb it, or because it is highly specialized. The evidence includes the employer's judgment, the written description, the amount of time actually spent on the function, the consequences of not requiring it, and the experience of people who have held the job.

Now look at the description most shops actually have. A duties list copied off a job board says "must be able to lift 50 pounds and work from ladders" and stops - no frequency, no duration, no proportion of the working day, no consequence. Against a dispatch history that shows the real numbers, it barely participates in the analysis.

The interactive process is a duty to talk, not a duty to agree

Once a shop knows of a limitation and a need, 29 CFR 1630.2(o)(3) contemplates an informal, interactive process to identify an effective accommodation. The request does not have to use the word accommodation, or the word disability, or be in writing. "My back is shot, I cannot do the attics for a while" is a request.

The duty is a conversation with a record: what the limitation is, what the person proposes, what the job requires, what options exist, what was tried. It is not a duty to say yes. Shops rarely lose this by refusing - they lose it by going silent, or by answering a request with a termination, so nothing shows a conversation ever happened.

You may ask for documentation of the limitation and the need. You may not ask for the whole medical file, and medical information you do receive is kept in a separate file from the personnel file, which is a legal requirement rather than a filing preference (the personnel-file card covers the structure).

What you are not required to do

This is the half that is missing from most articles, and it is the half that makes the rest usable.

• You do not have to eliminate an essential function. Restructuring means moving marginal functions, not core ones.
• You do not have to lower a production or quality standard that you apply uniformly to everyone in the job.
• You do not have to create a job that does not exist, or promote someone into one.
• You do not have to provide the specific accommodation requested if another option is effective. You choose among effective options; the employee does not.
• You do not have to provide personal-use items - a wheelchair, a prosthesis, ordinary eyeglasses.
• You generally do not have to bump another employee out of their position to make room.

Reassignment to a vacant position is a required accommodation of last resort under 42 U.S.C. 12111(9)(B), and the courts have genuinely split on whether that means placing the person or letting them compete for it. That split is real and unresolved, so if reassignment is where your situation is heading, that is the first phone call: take the job descriptions for both positions, the medical restriction, and your posting history for the vacancy to an employment lawyer before you post it.

Undue hardship at a shop's scale

Undue hardship means significant difficulty or expense measured against the resources of this employer, not an abstract one (42 U.S.C. 12111(10)). A nine-tech shop genuinely has a stronger hardship argument than a national contractor, and that is by design. The catch is that it has to be shown rather than asserted. "We cannot afford it" with nothing behind it loses to a dispatch report. The argument that works is arithmetic: how many calls of this type you ran, who else can run them, what absorbing them does to the schedule, what overtime or turned-down work results. That is a paragraph and a table, and the shops that lose are not the ones that could not make the argument - they are the ones that never wrote it down.

Direct threat, and why "it is not safe" is not a finding

When the concern is that the person will get hurt or hurt somebody, the legal route is the direct-threat defense at 42 U.S.C. 12113(b) and 29 CFR 1630.2(r): a significant risk of substantial harm that cannot be eliminated or reduced by reasonable accommodation, established by an individualized assessment resting on reasonable medical judgment and the best available objective evidence, weighing the duration of the risk, the nature and severity of the potential harm, the likelihood it occurs, and how imminent it is.

Every word there is doing work. Individualized means about this person, not the diagnosis. Objective evidence means a treating provider or an occupational medicine opinion, not the owner's sense of what people with that condition can do. And the common shop response - pulling someone off all work until they are "one hundred percent" - is an adverse action taken before the assessment, which is how a legitimate safety concern turns into a claim.

Worked: a lifting restriction on a six-tech route

A residential service tech, nine years in, hurts his back at home. It is not a workers compensation claim, which matters only in that no comp light-duty program is triggered; the ADA question is the same either way (the comp card covers that side). His provider writes: no repetitive lifting over 25 lb, no overhead lifting, no ladder work above 6 ft, for 12 weeks, re-evaluate.

Pull the dispatch history rather than arguing from impression. Over the prior 12 months he ran 186 service calls. Of those, 41 involved attic or roof access - 22 percent of the 186. Twelve required a two-person lift, 6.5 percent of the 186.

Is height work an essential function of a residential service tech? Twenty-two percent of a year is substantial, but frequency is one factor of several. This shop runs six techs, two of whom hold the duct certifications that already send most attic work their way, so the consequence of not requiring it from this tech for one quarter is small and measurable: 41 calls over 12 months is about 3.4 a month, so a 12-week window is roughly 9 to 10 calls, spread across the other five techs. Two extra calls each, over three months.

That number is the whole analysis. An owner who says "I cannot run a service department where one guy does not do attics" is describing a permanent arrangement; the request on the table is nine or ten calls. The two-person lifts change nothing, because they already required a second person - only which person lifts changes.

So the accommodation is a temporary route adjustment, written down, with the re-evaluation date in the calendar. Cost to the shop, stated honestly: dispatch friction and a small loss of routing efficiency for one quarter.

What changes the answer. If the restriction is permanent rather than 12 weeks, the same arithmetic runs against an indefinite horizon and the analysis moves toward restructuring the position or reassignment to a vacancy, which is the lawyer fork above. If the shop has two techs instead of six, those nine calls land on one person and the hardship argument becomes real - still to be shown with the numbers, not asserted. If the shop is an insulation or roofing crew where attic and height work is the job rather than 22 percent of it, height work is essential by the statute's own first test, and no restructuring reaches it.

The failure mode. The shop has no job description, writes one in the week after the restriction arrives listing "frequent ladder and attic work" with no numbers, and terminates. It now has a document created after the fact, a dispatch record that contradicts the word "frequent," and nothing showing a conversation.

Two more the trade generates

The diabetic tech and the schedule. The request is usually a predictable eating window, somewhere to test and dose, and not being dispatched to a six-hour job with no break. Under the ADAAA the condition is assessed without regard to insulin, so being well controlled does not remove the duty. A fixed break window rarely collides with an essential function; this gets genuinely hard on on-call and rotating night coverage, and the question there is whether call rotation is essential to the position or a scheduling convenience.

The tech whose condition makes ladder work unsafe. This is the direct-threat case and the error is deciding it on the category. The sequence is a written statement of what height work the position involves, a specific question to the provider about that work, an individualized assessment against the four factors, and only then a conclusion. Skipping to the conclusion is what turns a defensible safety decision into an indefensible one.

References

• Americans with Disabilities Act: 42 U.S.C. 12111(5), (8), (9), (10); 12112(d); 12113(b); ADA Amendments Act of 2008
• EEOC regulations at 29 CFR 1630.2(n), (o)(3), (r) and 29 CFR 1630.14(b)
• Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (2022, effective June 2023) and EEOC implementing regulations
• EEOC enforcement guidance on reasonable accommodation and undue hardship
• See related: Workers Comp Basics for Employer Reference; The Personnel File: What Goes In and Who Can See It; Retaliation: The Claim That Outlives the Original Complaint