posted on Monday, August 25, 2008 1:26 PM
by
Lou Michels
Sleeping Is a Major Life Activity
The heading is probably not news to most of us--sleeping has always figured prominently in my overall daily schedule. And not being able to sleep creates a real problem for most people.
The court of appeals in DC recently ruled that sleeping is a major life activity under the Rehabilitation Act, the federal employer version of the ADA. The case marked the first time that this court put sleeping in this category. The interpretation is not novel--other courts and the EEOC regulations support such a determination. But the court did more than simply expand the RA's coverage. The court also eased the burden of someone who can't sleep to file a claim against his employer.
The case involved an FBI trainee with diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from being held hostage in his mother's house by an armed robber/rapist two years before the plaintiff entered the academy (note--PTSD is an over-diagnosed psychological conditions; it comes up again and again in employment cases as a result of such mundane things as people being criticized about their work product--but at least in this case, the trauma appears to meet the criterion for the condition). The trainee satisfactorily completed his classes and the PTSD was apparently treatable. But the trainee obsessed over his behavior during the hostage incident and lost an appreciable amount of sleep during his training because he was unable to get an FBI assignment closer to home. The FBI ultimately terminated the trainee after learning of the PTSD diagnosis, for a variety of reasons that, up until that time, had not been an issue.
The court of appeals found that sleep was a vital life activity in its own right, and that receiving two to four hours of sleep per night for five months was a significant restriction on the ability to sleep. Perhaps as importantly, the panel also found that the employee did not have to show an effect on work performance because of the lack of sleep; the inability to sleep was sufficient to establish the disability protections of the Rehabilitation Act. The court also determined that expert testimony was not necessary to establish the impact or the disability; in this case, the employee would be allowed to testify on his own about how little sleep he had.
The FBI did not help its position by claiming that it had dismissed the trainee because of a lack of "emotional maturity" and "cooperative spirit." The court noted that this kind of generic and non-specific criticism could readily be perceived as a pretext for PTSD-based bias.
So the disability here that interferes with a major life activity is the PTSD, which stops someone from sleeping. Employers should be aware that someone with some type of sleeping disorder has already jumped through the very difficult ADA hoop of establishing that they are disabled.