The California law is clear – in some cases, when an employee is unable to return to work from medical leave due to the medical condition caused by workplace environment, he may be able to make a claim for constructive discharge, i.e. wrongful termination, even if he wasn’t actually terminated, but instead – was unable to return to work. Courts have made it clear that simply unpleasant working conditions are not enough to constitute a constructive discharge. On the other hand, as the two cases below demonstrate – an employer who intentionally creates conditions so bad that a reasonable employee would fee compelled to resign, and the conditions created constitute “wrongful” conduct under California law, is violating the law.
For instance, in Colores v Board of Trustees (2003) the Plaintiff alleged that the employer had targeted her for removal because of her involvement in uncovering unlawful activities at workplace. Plaintiff eventually took a medical leave of absence, followed by a medical retirement, claiming that the employer’s wrongful actions had caused her to become disabled from work. She never returned to her job. The court of appeal concluded that her medical retirement was equivalent to a constructive discharge, stating, among other things: “… the university, through its agents… made plaintiff’s working conditions so intolerable that her preexisting medical condition worsened to the point where she was no longer able to function in her duties and needed to remove herself from her job, and thus was effectively constructively discharged. The underlying facts of that facts were particularly egregious. The employer directed managers to document Plaintiff for termination even though they refused to do it. The employer stripped the Plaintiff off of many of her key duties, and created an impression that she was incompetent, switches her supervisors five times, and finally – violated her work restrictions, ordered by a doctor.
The court’s decision in Steele v Youthful Offender Parole Bd. (2008) also supports this conclusion. In that case, a young female state employee was a potential witness in a sexual harassment case against the state agency where she worked. To keep her from testifying, her superiors criticized her work performance on spurious grounds, gave her worse work hours, threatened to suspend her based on false charges, told her that a suspension would be a huge black mark on her state service record, and that she should transfer to another agency before the suspension was effective. The employee took stress-related sick leave and then resigned. The court noted “… we do not have to determine whether each individual action was an intolerable condition because the actions taken together support a finding that the plaintiff was unlawfully coerced into resignation.”
Each case of failure to return to work after medical leave caused by work related stress should be carefully analyzed in light of its unique set of facts and circumstances. Ideally, an employee should discuss his plan to not return to work from medical leave with an attorney before making that decision in order to at the very least understand what his potential legal options are, to make sure he is making the best decision under the circumstances.