Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—DISABILITY—6th Cir.: Energy company employee, fired for falsifying time records, cannot revive claims, (Jan 9, 2026)

By Todd Harrison, J.D.

He suffered from diabetes and alleged that the employer failed to accommodate his disability by refusing to assign him to the day shift during a refueling outage.

Affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment against an energy company employee’s claims for failure to accommodate, discrimination, and retaliation, the Sixth Circuit, in an unpublished opinion, determined that cases relied on by the employee to show pretext were inapposite, and the employer relied on a separate investigation, not just the word of the employee’s supervisor, in reaching its termination decision (Shears v. FirstEnergy Corp., No. 24-3915 (6th Cir. Jan. 5, 2026, unpublished)).

Over the course of nearly 30 years, the employee held several roles at the company, most recently as a maintenance supervisor in the Instrument and Controls department.

Diabetes. In 2012, the employee was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. He informed the employer of his diagnosis immediately and the employer exempted him from night shifts as a workplace accommodation.

Refueling outage. When the nuclear power plant where the employee was stationed had a scheduled refueling outage in March 2019, most employees were required to work 12-hour shifts. At the time, the employee’s supervisor was an individual who had been accused of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment. The employee had previously helped two coworkers file HR complaints against the supervisor.

The employee’s supervisor assigned him to a consistent 11:00 pm to 11:00 am schedule during the outage. According to the employee, this exacerbated his condition. He asserted that he spoke to the supervisor a dozen times regarding the toll the schedule was taking on his mind and body.

Upon receiving these complaints, the supervisor viewed them as general complaints about the workplace, not as formal accommodation requests. However, at some point, he informed the employee that he needed to obtain medical documentation if he desired a shift change. The employee submitted a doctor’s note dated April 3, 2019, requesting that the employee be excused from work for five days and that he be placed on the day shift for a one-month period. The employer granted this request.

Termination. Shortly after returning to work, the supervisor audited the employee’s time entries during the outage, comparing his timesheet entries to his recorded badge swipe data. The supervisor discovered discrepancies in 21 of the 26 time entries, ranging from 32 to 106 minutes. He reported his findings to HR and upper management. The Safety Conscious Work Review Team engaged in its own investigation and concurred with the supervisor’s termination recommendation.

The employer terminated the employee in May 2019, citing unprofessionalism and falsification of time records. The employee denied any intent to falsify records, attributing the discrepancies to his diabetic condition.

Lawsuit. Subsequently, the employee filed this lawsuit alleging the employer violated the ADA and Title VII by failing to accommodate his disability, discriminating against him because of it, and retaliating against him for engaging in protected activity. The district court granted summary judgment against all of the employee’s claims and this appeal followed.

Failure to accommodate. In his briefing, the employee advanced a straightforward failure-to-accommodate claim, arguing his employer violated the ADA when it refused to assign him to the day shift during the refueling outage. However, at oral argument he reframed this argument, conceding that the employer’s request for medical documentation was not, in itself, problematic and he no longer pointed to delay as the source of his claim. Rather, he now argued that his termination constituted the failure to accommodate.

Under this revised theory, the employee contended that the employer knew his disability was causing a cognitive impairment that could have led to his timekeeping errors, and his termination for those errors constituted a failure to accommodate because the employer was on notice of his need for accommodations.

According to the employee, the company’s decision to fire him for these discrepancies was itself a denial of a reasonable accommodation, in effect arguing that his termination was the basis for both his failure-to-accommodate and discrimination claims. The court was not moved.

McPherson. Although the court stated that the employee arguably forfeited this new theory, it nonetheless found that it failed on the merits. There was no attempt by the employee to adapt his reframed argument to the prima facie test. Instead, he pointed to McPherson v. Michigan High School Athletic Association, 119 F.3d 453 (6th Cir. 1997) (en banc), for the proposition that “[f]ailure to consider the possibility of reasonable accommodation for [known] disabilities, if it leads to discharge for performance inadequacies resulting from the disabilities, amounts to a discharge solely because of the disabilities.” The court found this reliance on McPherson to be misplaced.

In McPherson, a student was prohibited from participating in interscholastic athletic competition because of a rule that barred students enrolled for longer than eight semesters from participation in sports competitions. The student, who had been diagnosed with a disability after exhausting his eligibility, sought a waiver based on the new diagnosis but was denied. The court concluded that the student failed to make a claim under either the ADA or the Rehabilitation Act because the defendant did not promulgate the eligibility rule with the intent of barring students with learning disabilities from participation and could not have proffered a reasonable accommodation.

“McPherson did not meaningfully address—much less apply—the prima facie elements for an employment failure-to-accommodate claim. Nor did it establish some alternative test for failure-to-accommodate claims,” said the court. Further, McPherson did not involve a plaintiff being penalized for misconduct arising from his disability as result of the defendant’s failure to accommodate. The language quoted by the employee was dicta, “divorced from its context,” and did not relieve him of the obligation to satisfy the prima facie elements for an ADA employment claim, explained the court.

Dolgencorp. The employee also cited to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Dolgencorp, LLC, 899 F.3d 428 (6th Cir. 2018), in an effort to support his claim. There, a diabetic grocery store employee took and drank bottles of orange juice without paying for them first. Although she paid for the juice after-the-fact, she was fired for violating store policy. Ultimately, the court upheld the jury’s verdict in favor of the employee, explaining that she had asked for an accommodation that the employer categorically denied without considering any alternatives.

Here, the situation faced by the employee was distinguishable on the facts, said the court. The employer did not categorically deny his request to move to the day shift. Rather, it requested a doctor’s note before doing so. Given the employee’s abandonment of his initial theory and his concession that the employer provided his requested accommodation after receiving his doctor’s note, the court found that he could not show that the employer failed to accommodate his disability.

Disability discrimination. As to the employee’s claim for disability discrimination, he argued that his firing occurring shortly after the employer granted his accommodation request was in violation of the law. His prima facie case was undisputed, and the employer asserted that he was fired for a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason, shifting the burden back to the employee to show pretext.

Basis-in-fact. In arguing his case for pretext, the employee first contended that the employer’s reasons for his termination had no basis-in-fact, maintaining that the alleged time discrepancies were not the result of intentional dishonesty, and that any such misconduct was excusable because the employer failed to accommodate him, resulting in performance issues stemming from his disability.

To support this argument, the employee again pointed to language from McPherson, stating that the “[f]ailure to consider the possibility of reasonable accommodation for [known] disabilities” is a discharge “solely because of the disabilities” if the lack of accommodation leads to a discharge for performance problems stemming from the disabilities. The court was again unpersuaded.

Context matters, said the court, and the quoted language served the purpose of bridging the analytical gap between nonemployment-related and employment-related ADA cases for establishing a plaintiff’s prima facie case. Further, just as in the employee’s accommodation claim, McPherson did not reach the framework necessary for the court’s analysis. Indeed, observed the court, McPherson did not analyze pretext. Moreover, continued the court, the employee failed to point to any case that has acknowledged or extended McPherson’s causation discussion to overcome a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for discharge. As such, McPherson was inapposite and the employee’s argument missed the mark.

Honest belief. Next, the employe challenged the district court’s application of the honest-belief rule, contending that the employer’s reliance on the timecard investigation was unreasonable because it ignored evidence that his timesheet errors were nothing more than honest mistakes. The court here did not agree.

A reasonably informed and considered decision to terminate the employee was made following an adequate investigation involving various levels of review, explained the court, which was sufficient to overcome the honest belief rule.

Motivation. In a further effort to show pretext, the employee argued that even accepting that the timecard discrepancies occurred, those discrepancies did not actually motivate his termination. However, the court found that he had failed to proffer any evidence that the employer’s beliefs were “willful.”

As to his argument that the “punishment did not fit the crime,” the court noted that the record did not contain the company’s disciplinary policy, and the employee failed to provide any evidence that the employer deviated from its policy. As such, his motivation argument failed.

Comparators. Lastly, the employee contended that his timecard discrepancies did not justify his termination given his nearly three decades of unblemished service, arguing that others who had timesheet errors did not face termination.

On this point, the appellate court agreed with the district court that the employee had failed to provide sufficient detailed evidence about the other employees with intentional timesheet errors and how those errors compared to the inaccuracies on the employee’s timesheet, which proved fatal to the employee’s claim.

Retaliation. Finally, the court considered the employee’s claim for retaliation. Even assuming he could make out a prima facie case, the court found this claim faltered for the same reasons as his disability discrimination claim: his failure to show that the employer’s legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for his discharge was pretextual. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court was affirmed.

The case is No. 24-3915.

Judge: Davis, S.

Attorneys: Daniel P. Petrov (Thorman Petrov Group) for William Shears. Paul L. Jackson (Roetzel & Andress) for FirstEnergy Corp.

Companies: FirstEnergy Corp.

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