Warehouse Associate’s Cancer Treatments Counted Against the Attendance Points Policy After Her Accommodation Was Denied — She Was Fired, and the Chain Paid $99,000

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A warehouse job is built around one basic promise: show up, do the work, go home. For one associate at a JC Penney logistics center outside Atlanta, that simple routine got complicated fast when breast cancer treatments started colliding with an attendance points system.

Now the company is paying $99,000 and agreeing to change how it handles disability-related leave requests after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said the worker’s medically necessary time off was treated like ordinary absences and ultimately used to justify her firing. The details are laid out in the EEOC’s announcement of the settlement.

Her treatments needed time off — and she did what the company asked

According to the EEOC’s complaint, the employee worked as a warehouse associate at the JC Penney logistics center in Forest Park, Georgia. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she requested time off to attend medical appointments tied to her treatment.

The EEOC says she followed the process: a written accommodation request, plus medical documentation explaining her treatment and the need for leave. Those materials were submitted to the company’s third-party benefits administrator, which is often the gatekeeper for leave and accommodation paperwork.

For the employee, the goal seems straightforward: get approval so her absences wouldn’t be treated as a disciplinary issue. That’s the point of asking for an accommodation in the first place—making sure a health crisis doesn’t automatically become a job-loss event.

The denial set off a chain reaction under the points policy

The EEOC alleges JC Penney denied her accommodation request. That denial didn’t just leave her without official approval; it put her right back under the normal attendance rules.

Once her request was denied, the time she took off for cancer treatment was counted against JC Penney’s attendance points policy, the EEOC said. In workplaces that use points systems, a medical absence can look exactly like any other missed shift unless it’s coded differently or protected through an approved process.

From there, the math is unforgiving. The EEOC says she exceeded the number of points allowed, and the company fired her on July 3, 2023.

The EEOC says outsourcing accommodations can break down without real oversight

Instead of framing the case as a one-off paperwork mistake, the EEOC pointed to something bigger: what happens when an employer relies on a third party to manage accommodation requests but doesn’t keep close tabs on the results.

“Employers’ use of third-party administrators to handle reasonable accommodations can be inherently problematic, especially when not effectively monitored,” Marcus G. Keegan, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Atlanta District, said in the agency’s release.

The alleged violation falls under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits disability discrimination. In this account, the core issue wasn’t just that an employee needed time off. It’s that she asked for an accommodation, provided documentation, and still had treatment-related absences treated as punishable attendance violations.

The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division (EEOC v. Penney OpCo, LLC, Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-06582), after the agency said it tried to resolve the matter through its conciliation process first.

The settlement wasn’t only about money

The consent decree resolving the lawsuit requires JC Penney to pay $99,000 in monetary relief to the employee. But the agreement also forces the company to make changes aimed at preventing the same kind of outcome for someone else with a serious medical condition.

JC Penney must post a notice informing employees at its logistics centers about the settlement and about workers’ rights against discrimination. It also must provide periodic reports on how it handles future requests involving a failure to provide an accommodation at its logistics centers.

Training is another required piece. Under the decree, the company will train relevant managers on their responsibilities under the ADA, with an emphasis on determining whether an employee is entitled to an accommodation.

And the part that speaks most directly to what went wrong here: JC Penney will institute a new process for monitoring how its third-party leave administrator handles accommodation requests under the ADA. The decree also requires a review procedure before the company discharges employees who may have disability accommodation requests pending.

What people zeroed in on: paperwork, points, and the “pending request” trap

Even without a public comment thread attached to the EEOC release, the pressure points in the story are familiar to anyone who’s worked under a strict attendance policy.

One is documentation. The EEOC says the employee submitted a written request and medical records, which is exactly what companies typically demand. That matters because points policies can be automated and rigid; if the absence isn’t coded correctly, the system doesn’t care why someone missed work.

Another is timing. This is the scenario workers fear: you do the right thing, you file the request, and while it’s being processed—or after it’s denied—you still have to go to treatment. The absences pile up anyway. By the time someone looks up, the points threshold is already blown, and the termination becomes “policy,” not a choice.

The settlement’s requirement for a pre-discharge review when an accommodation request may be pending reads like a direct attempt to close that gap. It’s the difference between a manager seeing a points total and a manager being required to ask, “Is there an ADA request sitting somewhere in the pipeline?”

A firing over treatment days ended with new rules for the whole network

The EEOC’s Atlanta District Director Darrell Graham framed the outcome as more than a payout. “The EEOC is always pleased when an employer not only compensates the victim of discrimination but also takes active steps to ensure its future compliance with the ADA,” he said.

For the worker at the center of the case, the settlement can’t undo the instability of losing a job while dealing with cancer. But it does put a price on what the EEOC described as a wrongful discharge and forces changes that reach beyond a single warehouse.

For everyone else working in a logistics center where the clock, the scanner, and the attendance system run the day, the message is plain: when medical treatment collides with a points policy, the outcome shouldn’t hinge on whether a third-party administrator checked the right box.