Commute Accommodations for Disabilities Spur Federal Court Rift, Says Nicole Buonocore Porter
How courts define commute-related accommodation requests often dictates the results, said Nicole Buonocore Porter, a disability law scholar who directs the Martin H. Malin Institute for Law & the Workplace at Chicago-Kent College of Law. When courts view the commute as outside the workplace, they tend to hold that employers don’t have a duty to grant commute-related accommodations, Porter said. Courts tend to have that “knee-jerk reaction” in part because federal wage and hour law doesn’t require pay for the time getting to and from the job, she said.