The EEOC has asked the Third Circuit to revive a FedEx warehouse worker’s disability discrimination claim, arguing in an amicus brief that hemorrhoids causing chronic pain can qualify as a disability under the ADA, even when a lower court found the condition was not severe enough to count.
Christopher Butler worked as an operations supervisor at a FedEx Supply Chain warehouse and used intermittent FMLA leave for hemorrhoid flare-ups that caused pain, bleeding, and difficulty sitting, standing, and walking. After Butler took continuous leave for surgery in 2021, FedEx placed him on a performance improvement plan and fired him a month later. The district court granted FedEx summary judgment, ruling no jury could find the condition “substantially limited” a major life activity. The EEOC’s brief counters that the ADA Amendments Act requires courts to read “substantially limits” broadly, and that an impairment causing real difficulty or pain, even if a person can still push through it, is enough to reach a jury. Read the EEOC’s amicus brief.
Why it matters for HR: the ADA’s post-2008 amendments set a lower bar for what counts as a covered impairment than most managers assume. A condition doesn’t need to be permanent or visible, an episodic flare-up that causes real pain doing an ordinary task can qualify. FedEx’s paper trail, an approved intermittent-leave arrangement followed swiftly by a performance plan and termination, is a pattern the EEOC’s enforcement docket keeps surfacing, most recently in a separate case tying pay bias to a forced exit: employers who accommodate a condition on paper while treating the leave itself as the performance problem.
The original insight here is procedural, not medical: the EEOC isn’t arguing Butler should win, only that he should reach a jury at all. That is the same gap this publication covered today in a university hiring case, where a federal judge similarly ruled a jury, not a judge on paper, should weigh the evidence. For HR, that shift means the consistency between a leave policy and how a manager actually treats the request now matters more than the policy’s wording.
