Disability discrimination claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA); “Hostile work environment”; McNeal v City of Blue Ash; “Adverse employment action” & “failure to accommodate”; Retaliation; Michigan’s Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA); Wrongful termination; Michigan Occupational Safety & Health Administration (MIOSHA)

[This appeal was from the ED-MI.] The court held that plaintiff-Kellar failed to provide evidence to survive defendant-former employer’s (Yunion) summary judgment motion on her discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination claims. After Yunion’s office building was flooded, Kellar had concerns about an unsafe working environment and despite reports that the air was safe, declined to go back to the office. She requested an accommodation as to the portion of her work that she could not do from home and worked part-time remotely for a period. She later returned to the office. She then filed a complaint with MIOSHA, claiming that her hours were reduced in retaliation for her concerns about the safety of the building. She also filed a disability discrimination claim with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights and complaints with the Michigan Department of Labor. When her position was changed due to Yunion’s financial hardship during COVID, she left Yunion and sued. The district court granted Yunion summary judgment on all claims. On appeal, the court first considered Kellar’s claim of a hostile work environment. Under McNeal’s general hostile-work-environment analysis, which it concluded should extend to disability-based hostile-work-environment claims, she was still required “to provide evidence showing that, due to harassment based on her disability, her work environment was ‘objectively intimidating, hostile, or offensive.’” The court held that she did not. She offered no “evidence—beyond conclusory statements—indicating the work environment at Yunion ‘produce[d] “some harm respecting an identifiable term or condition of employment.”’” As to her claims for an adverse employment action and failure to accommodate, the court found that the critical question was whether Kellar could “perform the essential functions of the job while working from home for an extended period of time[.]” The court determined that the record clearly showed the answer was no. Case “managers needed to be onsite to perform essential functions of the job” including managing hard copy files kept in locked file cabinets. The job description listed “file management and document review as some of the principal responsibilities for the position.” As to her retaliation claims (1) for requesting accommodation and filing a disability-based discrimination complaint and (2) under Michigan’s WPA for filing workplace complaints, the court held that she failed to establish her prima facie case. It added that even if she had done so, Yunion offered legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for offering her an independent contractor position, budgetary reasons that were not pretextual. Finally, she abandoned her wrongful-termination claim. Affirmed.