Just yesterday we wrote about an EEOC press release that it had settled for $92,500 a disability discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a woman with Crohn’s disease whose employer refused to make the “reasonable accommodation” of providing her with an additional day of medical leave and instead fired her pursuant to a company attendance policy. 

A very similar case was reported to be settled by the EEOC today, this time involving a claim that the company illegally and unreasonably denied an employee who had suffered a stroke the reasonable accommodation of additional leave time required by her disability.  The EEOC, yet again, charged that the company, instead of “granting a modest extension of leave as a reasonable accommodation,” fired the employee.  Today’s settlement was for $50,000.

An EEOC attorney said that "The EEOC brought this lawsuit because the company was unwilling to be flexible and reasonable in considering [the employee’s] request for an extended leave period. … Federal law gives employees with disabilities, like [the employee], a means to continue their employment with the benefit of an accommodation."

Seems that the EEOC is either clearing its inventory of these types of “failure to accommodate” cases, or, more likely, it has many of them and has been targeting companies which are not “flexible and reasonable in considering [an employee’s] request for an extended leave period.”