Court Concludes ADA Does Not Apply to Post Employment Discrimination Against Retirees

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a retired Florida firefighter does not have standing to sue her former employer for disability discrimination because the discriminatory act occurred after her employment concluded. The suit was brought by former Sanford firefighter Karyn Stanley, who was diagnosed with Parkinsons in 2016, and retired on a non-line of duty disability pension in 2018.

Stanley contended that a 2003 decision by the city to reduce post-employment health care to 24-months constituted disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and Florida’s state disability law in 2020, when it impacted her. She also claimed her loss of benefits in 2020 violated her right to equal protection of the laws. Prior to the 2003 change, the city provided health care coverage to retirees until age 65.

The court acknowledged that federal courts are split on whether the ADA can be used by retirees in Stanley’s situation. The Second and Third Circuits have concluded that it can, but the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits have held it cannot. Given the circuit split, Stanley asked the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider its earlier decision in a case, Gonzales v. Garner Food Services, Inc., 89 F.3d 1523 (11th Cir. 1996). In declining to do so, the court explained as follows:

• The dispute between the parties turns on the definition section of the ADA.
• Title I of the ADA, as originally enacted, made it unlawful to “discriminate against a qualified individual with a disability because of the disability of such individual in regard to … employee compensation, … and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment.”
• The statute defined a “qualified individual with a disability” as someone “who, with or without reasonable accommodation, can perform the essential functions of the employment position that such individual holds or desires.”
• We held in Gonzales that a former employee who does not hold or desire to hold an employment position cannot sue over discriminatory post-employment benefits.
• We recognized that the ADA protects against discrimination in fringe benefits, such as health insurance, because these benefits have always been recognized as one example of a term, condition, or privilege of employment.
• But because the ADA prohibits discrimination only as to those individuals who hold or desire to hold a job, we reasoned that a former employee cannot bring suit under Title I to remedy discrimination in the provision of post-employment fringe benefits.
• In interpreting the ADA in Gonzales, we recognized that other employment discrimination statutes, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have been construed to protect former employees.
• We noted, however, that the precedents adopting that interpretation arose in the context of retaliation, not discrimination.
• We found that distinction important. As we had previously held, such a construction was “necessary to provide meaning to anti-retaliation statutory provisions and effectuate congressional intent.”
• That is, by prohibiting retaliation, a statute necessarily contemplated that it would apply to individuals who accused a former employer of unlawful behavior.
• So we endorsed a broad interpretation of anti-retaliation provisions to avoid excluding an especially vulnerable class of people from the statute’s protection and thus undermining Congress’s remedial scheme.
• We explicitly declined to extend this reasoning to Title I discrimination claims in Gonzales.
• Title I’s “qualified individual” definition, we said, was dispositive evidence that “Congress intended to limit the protection of Title I to either employees performing, or job applicants who apply and can perform, the essential functions of available jobs which their employers maintain.”
• We concluded that the plain language of Title I’s anti-discrimination provision did not “frustrate the statute’s central purpose”—i.e., protecting disabled people who can nevertheless perform the essential functions of a job—the way that a “literal interpretation” of other statutes’ anti-retaliation provisions may have threatened to do.
• Instead, to construe Title I to apply to former employees would “essentially render the [qualified individual] requirement … meaningless.”
• We acknowledge that the circuits are split.
• The Second and Third Circuits have held that Title I’s anti-discrimination provision is ambiguous, however, and have resolved that purported ambiguity in favor of former employees.
• We are not convinced by Stanley’s argument that we should follow the Second and Third Circuits.
• Because we hold that Gonzales is still good law, we must ask whether Stanley was a disabled employee or job applicant capable of performing the job at the time of the alleged discrimination.
• There are three points in time in which Stanley can theoretically root her Title I claim: (1) in October 2003, when the City amended the benefits plan; (2) whenever she first became subject to the allegedly discriminatory provisions of the benefits plan as a disabled employee; or (3) in December 2020, when she was affected by the termination of the health insurance premium payments.
• Neither option 1 nor option 3 works for Stanley. Although she was employed by the City in October 2003, she concedes, and we agree, that her claim cannot turn on the 2003 amendment to the benefits plan because she was not yet disabled at that time.
• Although she was disabled at the time of the December 2020 termination of the health insurance premium payments, that option doesn’t work because, by that time, Stanley’s relationship with the City was as retiree, not employee.
• She did not hold or desire to hold, nor was she qualified to hold, an “employment position” with the City, as required by Title I’s anti-discrimination provision and Gonzales.
• Because Stanley cannot establish that the City committed any discriminatory acts against her while she could perform the essential functions of a job that she held or desired to hold, her Title I claim fails. For the same reason, so do her claims under the Rehab Act and the Florida Civil Rights Act.
• Finally, we turn to Stanley’s claims under the Equal Protection Clause and Florida Statutes section 112.0801. The district court concluded that the City was entitled to summary judgment on both claims. We agree.
• Disabled persons are not a suspect class, and government-paid health insurance is not a recognized fundamental right, so we scrutinize the City’s benefits plan under the lenient standard of rational basis review.
• The City’s benefits plan advances the legitimate governmental purpose of conserving funds. And its chosen method—decreasing the number of employees for whom the City subsidizes health insurance—is rationally related to that legitimate purpose. So there is no equal protection problem here.
• Neither does the City’s benefits plan violate Florida Statutes section 112.0801.
• Stanley receives exactly what she is owed under the statute: the option to remain on the City’s health insurance plan.
• The statute does not require the City to pay Stanley’s health insurance premiums.
• To the contrary, the statute grants the City discretion over whether to pay retirees’ premiums.
• The City cannot violate a statute by exercising the discretion specifically granted by that statute.

As a result, the court never addressed the merits of Stanley’s claims (ie. whether it was in fact discriminatory to reduce the benefits). Here is a copy of the decision.