GB541 Unit 5 Case Analysis Example

Unpaid Leave for a Pregnant Technician: A Unit 5 Case Analysis Under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB541: Strategic HR Law and Risk Management

Unit 5 Case Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital, the technician and the manager are composite; the statute and regulation are real and summarized as of the course term, and the analysis is educational, not legal advice.

Facts

The technician has worked at a Quillmere small-animal hospital in the Houston suburbs for four years and is rated as fully proficient on every review. At fourteen weeks of pregnancy, the technician gave the hospital manager a note from an obstetric nurse practitioner. The note listed three restrictions for the rest of the pregnancy: no manual restraint of animals during radiographs, no work in rooms where inhalant anesthetic is in use, and no lifting of more than twenty-five pounds without help.

The manager read the note at the front desk, said that radiographs, surgery and lifting dogs were what technicians did, and told the technician to go home until the restrictions ended. No one from HR was contacted. The technician used nine days of accrued paid time off and then moved to unpaid leave, which had lasted three weeks when the regional HR partner learned of it from a payroll exception report.

The hospital employs eleven credentialed and on-the-job-trained technicians across two shifts, along with four veterinarians and six client service staff. It takes roughly eighteen radiographs a day. Most studies need two people in the room, one to position and one to restrain or operate the generator, so the technician's normal share was about three restraint sessions per shift. Surgery runs four mornings a week in one suite; dentistry runs two afternoons in a separate room. Patient care outside those rooms, laboratory work, pharmacy filling, discharges, client education, phone triage and inventory are all regular technician duties.

Issue

Did the hospital violate the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act when it answered a request for accommodation of pregnancy-related limits by placing the technician on unpaid leave without exploring any other arrangement?

Rule

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act took effect on June 27, 2023. Private employers with at least fifteen workers are covered, and each must adjust the job for a qualified worker whose pregnancy, childbirth or a connected medical condition creates a limit the employer knows about; the only escape is showing that the change would be too costly or disruptive (42 U.S.C. § 2000gg-1, 2024). The statute adds separate prohibitions that matter here. Three of them matter here. Withholding a job opportunity because a change would be needed is barred. So is imposing an arrangement the worker never discussed with the employer. And sending someone home on leave, with or without pay, is barred whenever some other workable change would keep that person at work.

The definitions are in the statute's first section (42 U.S.C. § 2000gg, 2024). A known limitation is one the employee or a representative has communicated to the employer. The definition of a qualified employee departs from disability law in one important way: a worker unable to do a core part of the job still counts as qualified when three things are true: the limit will not last indefinitely, the worker should be able to resume that task fairly soon, and the employer can work around the gap in the meantime. Undue hardship borrows its meaning from the Americans with Disabilities Act and is measured against the employer's overall resources.

The EEOC's final regulation, issued in 2024, explains those terms (29 C.F.R. § 1636.3, 2024). For a current pregnancy, the regulation generally treats "in the near future" as forty weeks from the start of the suspension. It lists temporary suspension of essential functions among possible accommodations, along with modified duties, job restructuring and light duty. It also limits documentation: an employer may ask only for what is reasonable under the circumstances to verify the restriction and why the job must change.

Before the Act, pregnant employees seeking accommodation had to prove under Title VII that comparable coworkers with similar restrictions received help the pregnant worker was refused (Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 2015). The Act was passed because that comparison left many workers without a remedy, and it does not require one.

Analysis

# Covered employer

Quillmere employs roughly 2,900 people. Coverage is not in question.

# Known limitation communicated to the employer

The technician handed the manager a written note from a clinician that named three specific limits. Knowledge reached the employer the moment the manager read it; a request does not need to use particular words, name the statute or go to HR. Each limit relates to pregnancy: manual restraint carries a risk of being kicked, scratched or exposed to scatter radiation, inhalant anesthetic exposure is a familiar concern in early pregnancy, and the lifting limit follows standard obstetric advice. The note itself was reasonable documentation, so the hospital had no basis to ask for more before acting.

# Qualified employee

This element carries the weight of the case. Restraining patients during radiographs is an essential function of the technician role at this hospital, and the technician cannot perform it for the rest of the pregnancy. Under disability law alone, that might end the inquiry. Under this Act it does not. The inability is temporary, because it ends with the pregnancy. Restraint work can resume within the regulation's time frame, because the remaining pregnancy is about twenty-six weeks, well inside the forty-week benchmark. The remaining question is whether the suspension can be reasonably accommodated, which overlaps with the next element.

The manager treated an essential function the technician could not perform as the end of the analysis, and the statute was written precisely to make it the beginning.

# Reasonable accommodation

Three arrangements would have kept the technician at work.

Radiographs. Removing the technician from restraint duty shifts about three sessions a shift to the other ten technicians, roughly one extra session for every three people each shift. Positioning aids such as foam wedges, sandbags and troughs, together with sedation where the veterinarian approves it, reduce the number of studies that need hands-on restraint at all. In exchange, the technician can take on duties the others would otherwise do, including laboratory samples, pharmacy, discharges and phone triage.

Anesthetic gas. The surgery suite and the dental room are separate, fixed spaces on a predictable schedule. Scheduling the technician away from them during procedures and recovery is a simple rotation change. Recovery of patients still exhaling anesthetic can be assigned to other staff.

Lifting. The hospital already owns a hydraulic exam table and a gurney. A rule that any patient over twenty-five pounds is moved by two people, or with the gurney, meets the limit and is already good practice for everyone's back.

None of these needed a new hire or new equipment. They required a conversation.

# Undue hardship

The employer bears the burden on hardship, and it has nothing to point to. The arrangements above cost little more than a revised schedule. If the hospital decided that busy days still left it short, two relief technician shifts a week at about $280 each would come to roughly $14,600 for the rest of the pregnancy, a modest sum against the resources of a 58-hospital group. Because hardship is measured against the employer as a whole, a single hospital's tight staffing does not establish it.

# The forced leave

The Act forbids requiring leave when another reasonable accommodation is available. That provision decides the case on its own. The manager made leave the first and only option, without asking the technician what would work, without speaking to HR and without considering any of the arrangements described above. The nine days of paid time off and three weeks of unpaid leave flowed directly from that decision. Because no interactive process took place, the company also cannot rely on the good-faith defense to damages that the statute's remedies section allows when an employer has made good-faith efforts to identify an accommodation.

Conclusion

The hospital violated the Act. Each element favors the technician, and the forced leave is a separate violation that would stand even if the other questions were closer.

Recommendation

Reinstate immediately. Return the technician to work this week under a written accommodation covering all three limits.

Make the technician whole. Restore the nine days of paid time off and pay back wages for the unpaid weeks, with the related benefit contributions.

Write and review the accommodation. Put the arrangements in a one-page document signed by the technician, the manager and HR, and review it monthly or when the clinician changes the limits.

Prevent the next case. Require every hospital manager to send any pregnancy-related request to HR on the day it is received, add a short scenario on this Act to manager training, and audit the past year of leave records for other pregnant employees placed on leave.

References

29 C.F.R. § 1636.3 (2024). https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-29/section-1636.3

42 U.S.C. § 2000gg (2024). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000gg

42 U.S.C. § 2000gg-1 (2024). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000gg-1

Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., 575 U.S. 206 (2015).