What rights does my father have at work concerning his asthma?
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What rights does my father have at work concerning his asthma?
My father has worked for an aerospace company for 40 years and now they are
threatening to fire him. He has a doctor’s note on file saying it’s
Asked on November 8, 2018 under Employment Labor Law, California
Answers:
SJZ, Member, New York Bar / FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney
Answered 6 years ago | Contributor
It depends on what his job is and whether it can be done only in a clean room. An employer has a legal obligation to make "reasonable accomomdations" to an employee disability or medical condition. A reasonable accomodation is a change in how or where the employee works, or the provision of some assistive devices, which is not too expensive or disruptive and which lets the employee do all the core or important functions of his job. For purposes of this answer, we assume that setting up a clean room is expensive and/or disruptive, so for your father to work in one, he'd have to work in an existing one. If the nature of his job, however, is such that he can't do core or important parts of it in the employer's existing clean room[s], assuming there are such already existing (e.g. he has work on machinery or components or do tasks not located in the clean room), they do not have to accomodate him--they have a right to require him to do the job he is employed to do. And if he cannot do that job--or cannot do it safely (since they don't have to incur liability on his behalf)--the may terminate him.
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