Ex-worker accuses Lowe’s of ADA violation

Woman with physical disability claims wrongful termination after 10 years at home improvement store

A woman who says she suffers from arthritis and spinal stenosis, which causes nerve pain, has filed a lawsuit against her former employer, accusing Lowe’s Home Improvement of violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and state and federal civil rights laws, as well as wrongful termination, discrimination, retaliation, assault and battery.

Janet Rodriguez, 58, who had worked at Lowe’s for 10 years, says in the lawsuit filed this week in state District Court in Santa Fe that she was fired from her position as a cashier in the Lowe’s lumber department in early March, following years of harassment by co-workers and managers over a disability that limited the type of work she could do.

Her boss at the home improvement store asked her to sign a termination form, the suit says, but refused to give her a copy of the document. When she grabbed the form from his desk and began to leave with it, the suit says, he lunged at her and aggressively tried to wrestle it out of her hands. A document from Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center shows she sought treatment in the hospital’s emergency room for a neck injury, called a cervical sprain.

A spokeswoman for Lowe’s said she couldn’t immediately comment on the case because she wasn’t familiar with

the lawsuit.

Years earlier, Rodriguez says in the suit, Lowe’s had made accommodations for her disability, assigning her to work as a cashier in the lumber department. That position required “greeting of customers, cashiering, cleaning of the department area and general security … which required constant physical movement, as her disability requires her to be constantly physically active in order to avoid stiffening in her spine and the onset of excruciating pain.”

Because of her condition, the suit says, she cannot work in a sedentary job.

But a couple of years later, she says, in December 2011, managers reassigned her to a position that required her to stand for hours at a time, against the recommendations of her doctor. “Despite having a clear understanding of Ms. Rodriguez’s physical disability and her need to be employed in the Lumber Department to accommodate her disability, the management reassigned her to work at the most sedentary position in the store, front-end cashier.”

When she reminded her managers of her need for disability accommodations, “management ordered Ms. Rodriguez to leave the store and go home,” the suit says.

She filed a discrimination complaint with the state Department of Workforce Solutions and obtained a letter from her doctor detailing her need for a job that allowed her to keep moving. Those actions prompted managers to return her to the lumber department, the suit says, but then she began to face harassment by co-workers.

She was distressed, the suit says, but “she assumed that she would somehow have to deal with the harassment in order to keep her job.”

The harassment continued, and even intensified, when a new store manager was hired in 2015, the suit says. Amid a discussion with the manager about her confusion regarding changes to a security door policy, the suit says, the boss angrily announced she was fired. The suit says the dispute over the door monitoring was a “pretext” and that the termination paper was already prepared.

The lawsuit says Rodriguez is seeking compensation for lost back pay and future pay, pain and medical expenses, punitive damages, court costs and attorney’s fees.