Why an Army Veteran Took Kiewit to Court: PTSD and Mental Health

Comparable office discrimination lawsuits have erupted involving different workers with particular disabilities, similar to a current case involving Terracon and a Gen Z engineer.

Kiewit Energy Constructors, the defendant in John’s lawsuit, is owned by a Kiewit Corp. subsidiary.

In line with the grievance, John’s 2004 deployment in Iraq concerned firefights and different fight eventualities that finally induced trauma making him unable to carry out his duties and finally led to his discharge in December 2005. The next years noticed John unable to work, experiencing “housing instability,” and he finally acquired a prognosis of post-traumatic stress dysfunction, he acknowledged.

In 2022, John started a $124,000-a-year job as a top quality supervisor for Kiewit Energy Constructors, first in Kansas after which the subsequent yr in Albany. His supervisor in Albany, John alleged, first gave him the silent remedy however then started making caustic feedback and insults that included John’s weight and even that he used treatment to deal with his PTSD.

The feedback focused John’s “struggles with psychological well being and associated disabilities,” mentioned his grievance.

In 2024 one other high quality management specialist reported the allegedly discriminatory feedback directed to or about John to the unit’s human assets director, his grievance alleges. As an alternative of disciplining the supervisor, John’s managers introduced up the topic of transferring John to a different metropolis, John’s grievance acknowledged. He was subsequently given a switch to Texas, reducing him off from household and residential in New York, and resigned as a substitute, he claimed.

That compelled resignation certified below regulation as a “constructive discharge,” John claimed, a time period usually used to explain when an worker is given a change that forces a resignation. And he claimed that motion and his different remedy violated the American with Disabilities Act and New York State Human Rights Regulation.

Kiewit: Claims Do not Measure Up

In August Kiewit sought to knock out a lot of the lawsuit in a partial movement to dismiss, arguing that it didn’t state a declare below the assorted legal guidelines concerned, together with these associated to retaliation and constructive discharge.

The remarks made by John’s supervisor had been neither frequent nor extreme sufficient to qualify as harassment below the regulation or as a hostile work atmosphere—one other broadly used authorized normal in such issues. 

Additionally, the alleged harassment was not directed at a situation that “certified as an ADA incapacity,” Kiewit argued. John additionally didn’t exhaust his administrative treatments accessible to him inside Kiewit for his ADA hostile work atmosphere declare, Kiewit acknowledged.

Federal court docket data present no response but on the movement to dismiss, with the final court docket submitting within the case made in December.