For California workers
The honest answer
If the accommodation was reasonable and your employer refused to even engage with it, yes — that refusal can violate California law twice over. FEHA requires employers to make reasonable adjustments for a disability or medical condition and to take part in a genuine, back-and-forth conversation about what would work. Ignoring your request, or answering it with discipline, breaks that duty. A stool, a schedule shift, modified lifting — small asks carry real legal weight.
These claims are measured by what the refusal cost — a job you could have kept, wages lost during a forced leave, the health toll of working unaccommodated — and by how unreasonable the employer's stance looks against how easy the fix was. An email trail of requests met with silence is powerful. We'll help you assemble exactly that record before your attorney call.
Mental-health conditions can absolutely qualify under California law. If a condition limits a major life activity — sleep, concentration, interacting with others — the accommodation framework can apply.
It can be — the law requires an effective accommodation, not necessarily your first choice. But the alternative has to actually work for your restrictions, and it has to come out of a genuine dialogue, not a take-it-or-leave-it memo.
Only real, demonstrated hardship excuses an employer — and the bar is higher than most managers assume, especially for larger companies. A bare “too hard” or “not fair to others” is not a legal answer.
Any hour means any hour
Tell us about the disability accommodation situation the way you'd tell a friend. We'll organize every detail and book your video call with a California employment attorney.
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