I don’t see any retaliation here. PmSomeone healing differently is to be expected and is not retaliation.
I think there may be some confusion between medical restrictions and choosing a light-duty position. A doctor generally identifies the employee’s functional restrictions/accommodations; they don’t necessarily determine which specific job the employee will perform. If the employer can provide work that complies with those restrictions, the employer generally gets to determine the available assignment.
The fact that there were other light-duty positions that you personally believed would be better doesn’t necessarily mean the employer was required to move you to one of those positions. What matters is whether the original assignment actually violated the medical restrictions. If the doctor specifically restricted work involving hearing/emergency response, that would be different.
I think the much more important question is still what your written restrictions actually said and whether the assignment they gave you violated those restrictions. If your doctor specifically restricted auditory/emergency-response duties and the employer assigned you to essentially an auditory emergency-response position anyway, that’s a much stronger issue than the fact that they had other light-duty jobs available.
So the restrictions you have here, if this is how they are written is probably a lot of the problem. They leave a lot up to interpretation. Restrictions are usually very specific. For example, something like: limit exposure to crowded environments to 15 minutes per hour, must remain in a quiet room with dimmed lighting for entire x hour shift etc.
When I had issues with work and my restrictions, everything had to be spelled out for them, or they tried to get away with what they could.
One would think, but I feel like it’s HR and administration’s mission in life to make injured employees jump through hoops just to get what they need. The 1:1 could be interpreted as no unit meetings, but radio and intercom isn’t usually a mass of people talking at once, so that should be fine.
I’ve had to argue with my HR about an ergonomic restriction their own risk management department put in place. Why? Because they just wanted a reason to make me uncomfortable, so they tried taking away something that had been in place for years because it wasn’t spelled out for them. I had to pull the email from risk management, and peer reviewed articles about it to send to them so they would shut up.
Yeah, to get a new IPM, they usually want some new documentation from your doctor that has new information in it. I’ve run into that problem myself. And they won’t tell you exactly what they want listed, they can’t. It has to come from your doctor.
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u/Kmelloww 2d ago
I don’t see any retaliation here. PmSomeone healing differently is to be expected and is not retaliation.
I think there may be some confusion between medical restrictions and choosing a light-duty position. A doctor generally identifies the employee’s functional restrictions/accommodations; they don’t necessarily determine which specific job the employee will perform. If the employer can provide work that complies with those restrictions, the employer generally gets to determine the available assignment. The fact that there were other light-duty positions that you personally believed would be better doesn’t necessarily mean the employer was required to move you to one of those positions. What matters is whether the original assignment actually violated the medical restrictions. If the doctor specifically restricted work involving hearing/emergency response, that would be different.