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Medley v. Valentine Radford Communications7/19/2005
Id. And " nder the Missouri statute, the employer has an affirmative duty to reasonably accommodate an employee's handicap but the burden is on the employee to establish that with reasonable accommodation he could perform the job." City of Clayton, 821 S.W.2d at 529. Because Missouri law provides the prima facie case, we do not look to federal law for the prima facie case.
The parties cite numerous cases, the majority of which are federal, to try to show why or why not Ms. Medley was disabled and should or should not have been reasonably accommodated. The threshold issue is whether or not Ms. Medley is disabled within the statute. And as already stated, to be disabled under the MHRA, Ms. Medley must be able to show that she has an impairment but can work with or without reasonable accommodation. Section 213.010(4). Since she was unable to work without accommodation, the question here is whether she can complete the essential functions of her job with reasonable accommodations.
Ms. Medley wants to skip right to the prima facie test that considers whether or not Valentine Radford made an effort to reasonably accommodate her. But before we can even get to that test, we must first decide the threshold question of whether she is disabled under the MHRA. Even under her test, the first element is whether she is disabled under the statute. And she is not.
Ms. Medley missed a lot of work during her ten and a half months at Valentine Radford. And although most of that missed time was sick leave, vacation, and medical leave, she also missed an additional five weeks without taking proper medical leave before her final absences that resulted in her termination. She knew that she needed a statement from a medical doctor to have her leave extended past November 1, 2001, but she did not obtain that statement. And although she did return before she was able to see the psychiatrist, there is nothing in the record explaining why she was unable to get a statement from the psychiatrist to justify the five weeks that she had already missed. Then, after being back for less than three weeks, Ms. Medley had a relapse and missed work again. And although she said that she was going to see the doctor the following week, she did not provide Valentine Radford with any definite time that she thought that she might return. So Valentine Radford was left in a situation where its media supervisor appeared to no longer be dependable, regardless of the reason. And although Ms. Medley offered at that late time to work part-time or from home, that was after she had already missed a lot of work without complying with the company's leave policy.
" egular and reliable attendance is a necessary element of most jobs." Spangler v. Fed. Home Loan Bank of Des Moines, 278 F.3d 847, 850 (8th Cir. 2002) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). And an employee who cannot regularly come to work is not able to satisfy any functions of the job, let alone the essential ones. Id. According to Mr. Huggins, Ms. Medley's job required her to be in the office. He stated that it was not a part-time position and that working from home had been tried and had failed because of the special requirements of the position. So working part-time or from home was not an option and she could not be accommodated in that way. See Kinnaman v. Ford Motor Co., 79 F. Supp. 2d 1096, 1103 (E.D. Mo. 2000) (the court defers to the employer's determination that regular and predictable attendance is an essential function of the job). There are certain jobs where such accommodation might be reasonable, but Ms. Medley's job was not one of them. Her job required her to be in the office, and, based on her own description of what she did, it was fast-
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