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Disabled staffer wanted exemption from policy mandating the use of safety shoes

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Supervisor’s take-home: When a staffer seeks a disability accommodation, your primary obligation is to engage in the interactive process in good faith in order to identify a reasonable accommodation – you won’t be held legally liable if the staff member causes a breakdown in the interactive process.

What happened: After his employer announced a policy requiring workers to wear steel-toed safety shoes all the time, a crew member asked to be exempted from the policy because he’d suffered a foot injury that left him unable to wear shoes with non-flexible toes. For six months, the employee was allowed to wear shoes that didn’t have steel toes. However, he was often admonished by coworkers and supervisors about his failure to wear safety shoes. In one instance, a colleague told the man he wasn’t supposed to be wearing shoes without steel toes, then called him a “motherf-cker.”

What people did: The worker was placed on unpaid leave and told to make an appointment with a specialist to get fitted for custom shoes. The man failed to schedule the appointment. In fact, he didn’t return to the workplace at the end of his unpaid leave.

Legal challenge: The employee sued for disability discrimination, claiming that the organization failed to accommodate his foot injury.

Result: The company won. The court said the employer tried to work with the disabled man in order to accommodate his condition, but the staff member himself caused a breakdown in the interactive process by neglecting to make the appointment for the custom shoe fitting despite his employer’s request that he do so.

The skinny: Courts rarely rule in favor of disabled employees who don’t engage in the interactive process in good faith and then try to blame their employer for the breakdown in the process.

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

(From the June 5, 2026, issue of HR Manager’s Legal Alert for Supervisors. To start your no-obligation trial subscription to the publication right now, please click here.)