Deaf Maryland woman wins $119K discrimination settlement
Here is a news story about a deaf woman in Maryland winning a workplace discrimination case in February from an incident in 2021.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said in a press release on February 24 that a deaf applicant sought a position working in a warehouse through Lyneer Staffing, LLC, a national staffing agency.
The warehouse accepted the deaf client as a worker and assigned her a start date. But before the deaf person was to start working, Lyneer Staffing canceled her assignment, saying that the warehouse did not provide ASL interpreters.
A news report explained that a Lyneer Staffing manager told the warehouse that she canceled the deaf woman’s position because she’s deaf. The deaf client contacted Lyneer Staffing to confirm her start date at the warehouse, but she was ignored until eight days later when she got a text from Lyneer Staffing that she couldn’t be placed at the warehouse because they did not have sign language interpreters.
The EEOC said the cancellation was due to the applicant’s disability and that it is a violation of the ADA for either employers or employment agencies to discriminate against people based on disability. The EEOC said the woman was fully qualified to do the job.
The EEOC filed a lawsuit on behalf of the deaf person in a federal court in Baltimore and won a $119,400 settlement, which will provide monetary relief to the deaf client. The EEOC said the settlement includes an agreement from Lyneer Staffing to adopt a policy to provide deaf applicants with ASL interpreters and train its managers and supervisors on deaf communication.
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The EEOC’s Philadelphia District Director, which oversees cases in Maryland, said, “We will take action when a hiring official chooses to believe that deafness alone negates all of an applicant’s skills, abilities, and positive attributes.”
So this is yet another case of a staffing agency paying out a settlement worth over $100,000 due to discrimination. Last month I reported that a deaf woman from Minnesota received a $180,000 settlement from a hospital after she was denied a job based on her disability.
https://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article272627912.html