Enforcement Guidance: Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship Under the Americans with Disabilities Act
27. Is an employer's obligation to offer reassignment to a vacant position limited to those vacancies within an employee's office, branch, agency, department, facility, personnel system (if the employer has more than a single personnel system), or geographical area?
No. This is true even if the employer has a policy prohibiting transfers from one office, branch, agency, department, facility, personnel system, or geographical area to another. The ADA contains no language limiting the obligation to reassign only to positions within an office, branch, agency, etc.(85) Rather, the extent to which an employer must search for a vacant position will be an issue of undue hardship.(86) If an employee is being reassigned to a different geographical area, the employee must pay for any relocation expenses unless the employer routinely pays such expenses when granting voluntary transfers to other employees.
85. 42 U.S.C. § 12111(9)(B) (1994); 29 C.F.R. § 1630.2(o)(2)(ii) (1997); see Hendricks-Robinson v. Excel Corp., 154 F.3d 685, 695, 8 AD Cas. (BNA) 875, 883 (7th Cir. 1998); see generally Dalton v. Subaru-Isuzu Automotive, Inc., 141 F.3d 667, 677-78, 7 AD Cas. (BNA) 1872, 1880-81 (7th Cir. 1998).
86. See Gile v. United Airlines, Inc., 95 F.3d 492, 499, 5 AD Cas. (BNA) 1466, 1472 (7th Cir. 1996); see generally United States v. Denver, 943 F. Supp. 1304, 1311-13, 6 AD Cas. (BNA) 245, 251-52 (D. Colo. 1996).
Some courts have limited the obligation to provide a reassignment to positions within the same department or facility in which the employee currently works, except when the employer's standard practice is to provide inter-department or inter-facility transfers for all employees. See, e.g., Emrick v. Libbey-Owens-Ford Co., 875 F. Supp. 393, 398, 4 AD Cas.(BNA) 1, 4-5 (E.D. Tex. 1995). However, the ADA requires modification of workplace policies, such as transfer policies, as a form of reasonable accommodation. See Question 24, supra. Therefore, policies limiting transfers cannot be a per se bar to reassigning someone outside his/her department or facility. \ Furthermore, the ADA requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations, including reassignment, regardless of whether such accommodations are routinely granted to non-disabled employees. See Question 26, supra.
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