TULSA (LN) — A federal judge on Tuesday allowed an ADA disability-discrimination claim to proceed to trial against Anchor Glass Container Corporation, ruling that a glass factory worker fired three days after calling to arrange her return from medical leave had raised a genuine dispute about whether the company's attendance policy was ever meant to apply to her at all.
Kathleen Holbrook, a former hot-end machine operator at Anchor Glass's Henryetta, Oklahoma plant, broke her arm in February 2020 and spent nearly a year on FMLA and disability leave while undergoing two surgeries. When she called HR manager Fred Dorrell on January 27, 2021 to say she was ready to come back, Anchor Glass terminated her three days after she submitted the corrected return-to-work paperwork — citing a provision of its Attendance Control Program that she had failed to report for work since her physician's January 13 release date.
Senior U.S. District Judge Francisco Besosa, sitting by designation from the District of Puerto Rico, rejected that rationale as a potential pretext, pointing to an internal tension itself. The policy opens by stating that Anchor Glass depends on a workforce that is consistently on the job "when scheduled to work," but a separate provision requires a doctor's release for any disability absence of three days or more. How that second provision applied to Holbrook — who was already on approved leave and had no scheduled shift — "is not entirely clear," Besosa wrote.
"This uncertainty of whether Ms. Holbrook needed to report her absences when she did not have a scheduled shift casts doubt on the policy being the real reason for her termination," the opinion states. A jury, Besosa concluded, could find that the real reason Anchor Glass let her go was that her arm injury had become permanent and she could no longer handle the heavy lifting required end of the plant.
The temporal proximity of the firing also weighed against summary judgment. Holbrook was terminated three days after contacting Dorrell about returning, a gap the court held sufficient to support an inference of discriminatory animus under Tenth Circuit precedent.
Anchor Glass had argued that Holbrook's own deposition testimony — in which she said she believed she was fired because of prior complaints she had made against a colleague — showed she lacked evidence of disability-based motive. Besosa rejected that framing, citing the principle that an employer can have multiple but-for causes behind a termination decision and that those motives are not mutually exclusive.
The ruling was narrower elsewhere. Besosa granted summary judgment to Anchor Glass on Holbrook's failure-to-accommodate claim, holding that she never identified a vacant cold-end position to which she could have been reassigned in February 2021 — a showing the Tenth Circuit requires even when an employer refuses to engage in the interactive process. Her Title VII gender-discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation claims, along with her FMLA claims, were dismissed with prejudice.
The discrimination claim now heads to trial before a jury that will decide whether Anchor Glass's attendance-policy justification was, as Holbrook contends, a pretext for pushing out a worker whose disability made her unfit for the job she had held for more than a decade.