Electric Boat Torpedoes Employee's Disability Suit over Remote Work

In a win in an Electric Boat discrimination case, a Connecticut federal district court decision released yesterday illustrates for employers two important principles under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Connecticut Fair Employment Practices Act (CFEPA). The first is that employers are required to provide a reasonable accommodation—but not necessarily the accommodation an employee requests—and second, employees have an obligation to participate in the interactive process in good faith.

In Belval v. Electric Boat Corp., the court ruled in favor of the Electric Boat on both disability discrimination and failure-to-accommodate claims after concluding that the employer had engaged in a meaningful interactive process, offered a reasonable accommodation, and ultimately terminated the employee for legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons rather than because of his disability.

The Employee Requested Permanent Remote Work

The plaintiff suffered from several serious medical conditions, including a congenital heart defect, a compromised immune system, circulatory problems, and severe anxiety. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Electric Boat allowed him to work remotely for more than a year.

As employees gradually returned to the workplace, the employee requested to continue working from home full-time as a disability accommodation. Initially, the company extended his remote work based on his physician's recommendation. Later, when the employee sought permanent remote work following an extended medical leave, Electric Boat again reviewed updated medical information and engaged in the interactive process.

Rather than approve permanent remote work, the company offered the employee the opportunity to work remotely three days per week—more remote work than similarly situated employees were receiving. The employee, however, never accepted the proposal and largely stopped communicating with the employer regarding the accommodation.

A Reasonable Accommodation Is Enough

One of the most significant aspects of the decision is the court's reaffirmation of a fundamental ADA principle: an employer is not required to provide the employee's preferred accommodation.

Instead, the employer satisfies its obligations if it offers an accommodation that is reasonable and enables the employee to perform the essential functions of the job.

Here, the employee argued that only full-time remote work would suffice. The court disagreed. It noted that the employee's healthcare provider merely recommended that remote work be "strongly considered" where possible—not that five-day remote work was medically necessary. Because the employer offered a hybrid work arrangement and there was no evidence that full-time remote work was required, the court concluded that the accommodation offered was reasonable as a matter of law.

For employers, this is an important reminder that while accommodation requests should be considered carefully, the law generally allows employers to choose among effective accommodations. Employees cannot insist upon their preferred solution simply because another reasonable alternative exists.

The Interactive Process Is a Two-Way Street

The decision also underscores that the interactive process imposes obligations on both parties.

The record showed that Electric Boat repeatedly attempted to communicate with the employee, discuss possible accommodations, and arrange meetings through its Occupational Health Center. According to the court, the employee frequently failed to respond, directed company representatives to communicate only with his attorney, ignored repeated telephone calls, and ultimately failed to report for a required Occupational Health appointment, despite written notice.

The court held that even if there had been a dispute regarding the adequacy of the accommodation offered, the employee's failure to cooperate independently defeated his failure-to-accommodate claim because he was responsible for the breakdown in the interactive process.

This portion of the opinion serves as a valuable reminder that employers should thoroughly document every effort to communicate with employees during the accommodation process. When an employee refuses to engage, those efforts may become critical evidence if litigation follows.

Qualification Matters

The court also concluded that the employee failed to establish that he remained qualified to perform the essential functions of his position.

While the employee had successfully worked for the company for several years, the evidence surrounding his condition at the time of termination told a different story. The court relied on evidence that:

• the employee had received documented performance warnings;

• he had been on medical leave for approximately eighteen months;

• he admitted during his deposition that he had difficulty functioning while working for another employer shortly before his termination; and

• shortly after his termination, he applied for Social Security Disability benefits supported by medical evidence stating that he could work only one hour per day.

The court concluded that no reasonable jury could find that he remained qualified to perform the essential functions of his position. Although SSDI applications do not automatically bar ADA claims, this case illustrates that statements made in disability benefit applications may become significant evidence when they appear inconsistent with an employee's assertion that he or she could perform the job with a reasonable accommodation.

The Disability Discrimination Claim Also Failed

The employee also alleged that Electric Boat terminated him because of his disability.

The court rejected that claim, finding no evidence that disability was the "but-for" cause of the termination. Instead, the record demonstrated legitimate business reasons for the decision, including documented performance concerns, failure to comply with return-to-work requirements, failure to engage in the interactive process, and failure to report as directed.

The court also observed that Electric Boat had known about the employee's disabilities when it hired him and had continued employing him for approximately five years while providing significant accommodations, including extended remote work during the pandemic and a lengthy medical leave. Those facts weakened any inference that the company harbored discriminatory animus.

Practical Lessons for Employers

The Belval decision offers several practical takeaways for Connecticut employers:

• Remember that the ADA requires a reasonable accommodation—not necessarily the employee's preferred accommodation. Employers retain discretion to choose among effective accommodations.

• Document every step of the interactive process. Maintain records of requests, medical documentation, proposed accommodations, meetings, emails, telephone calls, and follow-up communications.

• Require employees to participate in the process. The interactive process is a shared responsibility. An employee who refuses to communicate or cooperate may undermine a later failure-to-accommodate claim.

• Evaluate current medical information. Accommodation decisions should be based on the employee's present ability to perform the essential functions of the position—not solely on past performance or temporary pandemic-era work arrangements.

• Do not assume that prior remote work establishes a permanent entitlement to work from home. Courts continue to recognize that employers may reassess operational needs and determine that a hybrid or in-person work arrangement is appropriate, provided a reasonable accommodation is offered.

The decision is a reminder that courts will look closely at whether employers engaged in a thoughtful, documented interactive process and whether the accommodation offered was reasonable under the circumstances. Employers that carefully evaluate accommodation requests, communicate openly with employees, and document each step of the process place themselves in the strongest position to defend ADA and CFEPA claims if litigation arises.

U.S. DOL Issues Opinion Letters on Non-Exempt Work for Exempt Employees, Bonuses, and Compensable Time

The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued a number of opinion letters addressing exempt status, bonuses, and what constitutes compensable time. While opinion letters do not carry the force of law, they are instructive as to the position the DOL would take on similar issues.

Opinion No. 2026-5: If an Exempt Employee Picks up Shifts in a Second, Non-Exempt Role at a Company, do they Lose their Exempt Status?

This opinion involved a hospital that employed exempt Nurse Specialists. The Nurse Specialists worked about 40 hours per week in that role. They would also occasionally pick up one to two 12-hour shifts per week at the hospital as non-exempt Staff Nurses. The question posed to the DOL was whether picking up non-exempt work jeopardized the nurses' exempt status as Nurse Specialists.

The DOL concluded it did not. If an employee performs work in both exempt and nonexempt roles in the same workweek, the employee can be properly classified as exempt if the exempt role remains the employee’s primary duty. When a substantial majority of the employee’s time is spent in the exempt role, that generally satisfies the primary duties requirement for an exemption. This will be a fact-specific determination. Here, the nurses only picked up one or two 12-hour shifts on weekends as a supplement to their income. The remaining 40 hours each week were spent performing exempt work as Nurse Specialists. 

Opinion No. 2026-6: Calculating the Regular Rate of Pay for Overtime with a Quarterly Non-Discretionary Bonus Pool

This opinion letter involved an employer who funds a non-discretionary quarterly bonus pool based on company sales. At the end of each quarter, the employer determines each eligible employee's share of the pool by comparing the employee's total earnings—including both straight-time wages and overtime pay—to the total earnings of all eligible employees. Each employee receives the same proportional share of the bonus pool as the employee's share of the group's total earnings. The question posed to the DOL was whether this properly accounts for employees' regular rate of pay for calculating overtime.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) distinguishes between discretionary and non-discretionary bonuses. A discretionary bonus where the employer has complete control over whether to pay the bonus and how much to pay. A Christmas bonus that the employer may or may not pay is an example of a discretionary bonus. Discretionary bonuses are excluded from the employee’s regular rate of pay when calculating employee overtime pay.

A non-discretionary bonus is one that employees expect because the employer has promised it in advance or because it is paid pursuant to an established policy, plan, or practice—like hitting revenue, safety, or production targets. These bonuses are considered part of employees' compensation for their work and therefore must be included in the regular rate of pay for overtime purposes.

Calculating overtime premiums is straightforward for an employee whose only compensation for a given workweek is an hourly wage. However, for employees who receive non-discretionary bonsues, the employer usually has to go back and recalculate overtime for every workweek covered by the bonus and pay any additional overtime that is owed because the bonuses is paid well after the normal pay periods in which they are earned.

The Department of Labor says there is one important exception to this requirement. If a bonus is calculated as a percentage of the employee's total earnings (including both regular wages and overtime wages), then the overtime has already been built into the bonus. In that situation the employer does not have to go back and recalculate overtime, and the employer does not have to make an additional overtime payment on the bonus.

To illustrate this pointt, assume there are two employees, Mark and Tim.

• Mark earned $10,000 in this quarter and worked no overtime.

• Tim earned $13,000 in this quarter. $10,000 was straight time, and $3,000 was overtime.

At the end of the quarter, the company decides everyone gets a bonus equal to 10% of everything they earned this quarter.

• Mark gets a $1,000 bonus.

• Tim gets a $1,300 bonus.

Because Tim’s overtime earnings were already included in the amount used to calculate his bonus, he received a larger bonus. Because the bonus increased both regular earnings and overtime earnings by exactly the same percentage, the overtime portion of his bonus has already been paid and there is nothing left for the employer to recalculate.

Opinion No. 2026-7: Are Long Walks to the Parking Lot Compensable Time?

Employees get a 30-minute unpaid meal break period where they can leave the worksite. The worksite is a large facility and requires a 10 to 15 minute walk to the parking lot in order to leave. Is that walk time compensable as time worked? 

The DOL says no. The FLSA only requires that employees receive one thirty minute unpaid meal break after seven and half hours of work; it does not require that employees be permitted to leave the worksite. Therefore, the employer is not required to pay employees for the time it takes to leave or to extend the meal break to accommodate travel.

Opinion No. 2026-8: Rounding Time and Pre-Shift Work

A hospital’s non-exempt employees clock in up to seven minutes early and immediately begin pre-shift work: patient handoffs, locating assignments, and completing documentation.

The timekeeping system rounds those early clock-ins to the scheduled start time, so employees aren’t paid for that time. Must the employer pay for this pre-shift work and does this rounding policy comply with the FLSA?

The DOL concluded the employer was likely violating the law on both counts. 

Pre-Shift Activity

Under the FLSA, an employee must be paid for any pre-shift activity that is “integral and indispensable” to the employee’s principal job duties. 

The DOL identified several pre-shift activities the hospital’s employees performed before the start of the workday and concluded that at least some of those activities were compensable where they were integral and indispensable to employees’ principal job duties. In particular, tasks such as reviewing patient status through handoff reports and identifying assigned patients were necessary for respiratory therapists to safely and effectively begin patient care, and therefore constituted compensable work. The DOL explained that these activities were intrinsic to the employees’ job duties and could not be dispensed with without impairing performance of those duties.

Rounding Time

Under FLSA regulations, employers may round employee time to the nearest fraction of an hour, but only if the practice will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked. Courts evaluate rounding practices by examining two requirements: the policy must be facially neutral and it must not consistently favor the employer. 

Under the hospital’s rounding policy, employees who checked in early and performed work had their time rounded up to their scheduled start time, but time was not rounded up when employees clocked out late at the end of their shift. Accordingly, the DOL concluded the policy failed both requirements for rounding time: it was not a neutral policy, because rounding up only applied for early clock ins, not late clock outs, and it consistently favored the employer.

Finally, the DOL cautioned that today’s technology makes accurately capturing employee time to the minute easier than in the past, so it will closely scrutinize employer time rounding.

The U.S. DOL’s 2026 Regulatory Agenda: OSHA Heat Rule, Foreign Workers, Tips, and Employment of Minors

The U.S. Department of Labor recently issued its 2026 regulatory priorities for the remainder of the year. The agenda includes proposals to address heat safety, employment of minors, and employment of foreign workers. While the agenda is scant on detail, the appointment of Keith Sonderling as Labor Secretary suggests any DOL rules, with the exception of rules on the employment of foreign workers, are likely to be business-friendly.

The items on the agenda include:

OSHA Heat Rule

One of the biggest items from the DOL’s regulatory agenda is an OSHA rule prescribing standards to address heat hazards in both indoor and outdoor settings. The Biden administration had proposed a heat standard that set triggers for employers to protect workers from heat injury and illness when the heat index reaches certain thresholds. It was anticipated that the Trump administration would drop the rule, but it instead held a hearing last summer and accepted more comments from the public on what the heat standard should look like. 

According to the regulatory agenda, OSHA plans to issue a Supplemental Notice Of Proposed Rulemaking on the heat rule by December this year. Federal agencies issue Supplement Notices either when the intend to substantively change a published rule or when a substantial amount to time passes between the intially proposed rule and the final rule. Once the the Supplemental Notice notice is issued it will indicate whether OSHA is proposing changes to the heat rule and provide an opportunity for public comment.

Rulemaking on Tips

Whether and when tip-earning workers should be paid the lower tipped minimum wage versus the full minimum wage when doing non-tip generating side work has been a frequent source of litigation and may be the subject of DOL rulemaking this year.

The administration may also be considering expanding who is considered a tipped employee, to qualify more jobs that historically may not have been considered “customarily and regularly tipped” employees. Earlier this year, in response to H.R. 1’s “no tax on tips” provision, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued regulations, that categorizes workers in more than 70 occupations as employees that “customarily and regularly receive tips.” The DOL may follow. Employers can expect a proposed rule sometime in August.

Employment of Minors

The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division will pursue updates to the Fair Labor Standards Act child labor rules. The initiative does not contain much detail other than stating the Division is considering an update to permissible hours of work for minors age 14 and 15. Currently, federal law permits minors ages 14 and 15 to work no more than 3 hours on a school day, no more than 8 hours on a non-school day, no more than 18 hours a week when school is in session, and no more than 50 hours during a week when school is not in session; and between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.—except between June 1 and Labor day when the evening hour is extended to 9 p.m. Connecticut imposes its own restrictions. The Wage and Hour Division expects a proposed rule to be issued in September.

Employment of Foreign Workers

Another item on the DOL’s 2026 regulatory agenda “Modernizing the Labor Market Test and Improving Protections for U.S. Workers in the PERM Immigrant Visa Program.” The Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) is the first major step in the employment-based permanent residence (green card) process for many foreign workers. The PERM process is administered by the U.S. DOL and is designed to protect U.S. workers by ensuring that employers do not displace qualified U.S. workers with foreign workers. The PERM process generally consists of three stages:

• The employer requests a prevailing wage from the DOL, which is the minimum wage that can be offered for the position.

• The employer must test the U.S. labor market by advertising the position and attempting to recruit U.S. workers. This include publishing job advertisements in two Sunday newspapers, placing a job order with the state workforce agency, internally posting the job advertisement, and taking three additional recruiting steps. If there are qualified, willing, and available U.S. workers, the employer generally cannot proceed with the PERM application.

• If recruitment does not identify a qualified U.S. worker, the employer files Form ETA-9089 with the DOL. If approved, the employer may move to the immigration portion of the process.

Anticipated Changes

The permanent labor certification, or PERM, process has come under major scrutiny from the government as part of a crackdown on what it sees as abuses of the H-1B specialty occupation visa program. The administration has overhauled the annual lottery to award visas, and the DOL has issued draft regulations to significantly increase wage floors for temporary and permanent foreign workers.

With this background in mind, its anticipated that the DOL to move away from a fixed set of prescribed recruitment activities (particularly newspaper ads) toward a standard that ties the labor market test to the employer’s actual recruitment practices for comparable roles. Other changes are likely to include increased employer record retention obligations and sharper scrutiny of the employer’s stated reason for rejecting a U.S. worker in favor of a foreign national. The increased obligations will likely lead to longer PERM processing times as well.

U.S. Supreme Court Revokes TPS Status for Haitian and Syrian Workers

On June 25, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian Immigrants, thereby also revoking their right to work in the U.S. 

Haiti is most prominent because it has the largest population the US under TPS with significant numbers of people in Florida, Massachusetts, and New York.

TPS Permits People to Work in U.S.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a humanitarian immigration program created by Congress in 1990. It permits the Secretary of Homeland Security to allow nationals of designated countries who are already present in the United States to remain here temporarily when conditions in their home country make it unsafe or impracticable to return. A person with TPS status may obtain employment authorization to work (a work permit).

Haiti received TPS designation in 2010 following the country’s 2010 earthquake; Syria received TPS status in 2012, after the outbreak of civil war.

DHS later announced terminations of both designations, but lower courts temporarily delayed those terminations while litigation proceeded.

The Supreme Court’s decision lifted those delays and held the TPS statute generally bars judicial review of nonconstitutional challenges to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s decision to designate or revoke TPS status.

As it stands, TPS for Haiti will expire on July 24, 2026. TPS for Syria, as well as Burma, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, and South Sudan will expire July 17, 2026. 

What Employers Should do Now

When TPS status terminates for an individual, his or her employment authorization also ends, unless the employee has another basis for work authorization. Consequently, it would be prudent for employers who may potentially be affected to review Form I-9s to identify employees with TPS-based authorization. If an employee’s TPS status is set to expire, the employer may require reverification of an employee’s authorization to work in the U.S. Without being able to satisfy the I-9, your employee is no longer authorized to work. Continuing employment for that individual, however, may create liability for the employer for knowingly violating the Immigration Reform and Control Act.