Q: Due to a chronic health condition (and COVID) I have an MD letter to work from home. Can work deny this?
Work will not allow me to work from home. I need help understanding my options and the best way to proceed but getting this information from work has been exceedingly difficult. I recently requested to start paperwork for short-term disability. This paperwork was provided along with the suggestion that if my request for short-term disability was denied I may want to consider filing an unemployment claim (which came across as a veiled threat). My goals are (1) to return to work as soon as medically sound (2) to have my current job to return to (3) to maintain some level of income in the interim. What should my next steps be? And thank you, very much for any suggestions you can provide.
A: I would recommend reaching out to an employment attorney in your state for a consultation. More information is needed on your medical condition to determine if it qualifies as a disability under the ADA. If it does, you might try to request a reasonable accommodation of working from home. Looking at this from another angle, if the employer has more than 50 employees within a 75 mile radius of your job site and if you have worked there for more than a year and more than 1250 hours, you may qualify for FMLA. FMLA will protect your job for 12 weeks.
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