Disabled man didn’t want to wear steel-toed safety shoes

Safety insight: If a crew member seeks an exemption from a safety policy because of a disability, talk to your safety manager before deciding whether to approve the request.

What happened: When his employer instituted a policy mandating the use of steel-toed safety shoes, a crew member asked his supervisor for an exemption from the policy because he’d suffered a foot injury that prevented him from wearing shoes with nonflexible toes. While the employer was evaluating his request, the staffer was allowed to work for six months without wearing steel-toed safety shoes. But the staff member’s coworkers were unhappy with his exemption from a policy they had to follow. One colleague even admonished him for not wearing safety shoes, then called him a “motherf-cker.”

What people did: The employer was unwilling to continue the exemption, so the man was placed on unpaid leave and told to make an appointment with a specialist to get fitted for custom safety shoes. The worker failed to schedule the appointment. In fact, he never returned to the workplace at the end of his unpaid leave.

Legal challenge: The staffer sued for disability discrimination.

Result: The company won. The court said the worker wasn’t discriminated against because of his foot injury. The judge pointed out that the employer tried to accommodate the man’s disability by asking him to get fitted for custom safety shoes, but he didn’t even schedule the appointment.

The skinny: Courts rarely rule in favor of employees who don’t think they need to follow their employer’s safety policies.

Cite: Vance v. Amazon.com Services LLC, U.S. District Court, N.D. Illinois, No. 24-cv-1111, 5/12/26.

(From the June 22, 2026, issue of Safety Alert for Supervisors. To start your no-obligation trial subscription to the publication right now, please click here)