“…The EEOC’s suit accused the companies of failing to make a reasonable accommodation for the clerk’s disability, discrimination and wrongful termination...”
According to the terms of the settlement, the former clerk will receive $125,000, while San Diego-based Partnership with Industry—the non-profit employment support organization that sent the job coach—will receive $7,500.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has settled its discrimination lawsuit against a California-based hotel chain for allegedly firing a front desk clerk with autism, the agency announced on Monday.
The hotel chain, Comfort Suites and its parent company, Newport Beach, Calif.-based Tarsadia Hotels, have agreed to pay $132,500 and make several changes to its employment practices and operations, the EEOC said in a statement.
According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, filed in a Los Angeles federal court in September 2010, supervisors at the Comfort Suites Mission Valley Hotel in San Diego denied a former front desk clerk diagnosed with autism access to a job coach that “would have helped the clerk learn to master his job by using autism-specific training techniques,†as well as made repeated disparaging remarks about his condition.
After refusing on several occasions to allow the job coach into the hotel, the supervisors allegedly accused the clerk of mishandling a hotel guest’s packages and fired him.
