Butterball, LLC will pay $230,000 and change how it handles medical leave requests to settle a federal lawsuit over a long-term employee who was fired while undergoing chemotherapy, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced on September 15, 2026. The EEOC said the worker at the company’s Mt. Olive, North Carolina, operation asked for intermittent leave for cancer treatment, was referred to an outside benefits administrator, never received the leave, and was fired after racking up attendance points for her cancer-related absences.
A chemotherapy leave request that was never granted
According to the EEOC’s September 15 announcement, the employee told Butterball about her cancer diagnosis and that she needed intermittent leave to receive chemotherapy and recover from the treatments. The poultry processor referred her to its third-party benefits administrator, but the leave was never granted.
The employee then accrued attendance points for her cancer-related absences, and Butterball fired her for violating its attendance policy, the EEOC alleged. The agency did not name the worker. The EEOC said the conduct violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities unless doing so would cause undue hardship, and which bars discrimination because of disability.
The EEOC filed the case, EEOC v. Butterball, LLC, Case No. 5:26-cv-00202-FL, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina after first trying to settle through its pre-lawsuit conciliation process. The case was resolved through a consent decree, and the announcement does not describe a court finding of liability.
Inside the guide: Money from an employment settlement like Butterball’s reaches the worker through its own notice and payment dates, often while treatment and a job search are underway. A claim log and payment tracker and a step-by-step filing walkthrough are part of The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
An employer cannot hand off ADA duties
Melinda C. Dugas, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Charlotte District, said the case carries a message for companies that outsource leave administration. “Employers that hire third-party benefits administrators must ensure that effective policies and procedures are in place to meet the employer’s statutory obligations under federal workplace discrimination laws,” she said. “An employer cannot delegate its responsibility for complying with the ADA.”
Samuel Williams, a trial attorney in the Charlotte District, said, “Federal law guarantees qualified individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to work. The EEOC is committed to holding employers accountable when they violate those rights and pursuing all appropriate relief for victims of discrimination.”
The EEOC’s guidance on employer-provided leave and the ADA makes the same point in more detail. It says an employer that relies on a third-party provider to run leave programs should make sure the provider’s automatic form letters comply with the employer’s ADA obligations. When leave cannot be granted under an existing program, such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, the employer should promptly engage in an “interactive process” with the employee to decide whether leave can be provided as a reasonable accommodation.
The same guidance addresses attendance rules directly. Employees with disabilities are not generally exempt from policies that limit unplanned absences, the EEOC says, but those policies may have to be modified as a reasonable accommodation for disability-related absences unless the employer can show undue hardship. In one example in the guidance, an employee warns that her disability may cause periodic unplanned absences beyond what the policy allows; the EEOC says that is a request for reasonable accommodation, and the employer should work with her to determine how often the absences are likely to occur and whether an exception would cause undue hardship.
The guidance also cautions employers that handle regular leave requests separately from requests for leave as an accommodation to make sure the people responsible for each communicate with one another. In the Butterball case, the EEOC alleged that the request went to the outside administrator while absences continued to count against the employee under the attendance policy.
What Butterball must change over two years
Under the two-year consent decree, Butterball will make sure effective policies and procedures are in place for receiving and processing requests for reasonable accommodations under the ADA. It will provide its leave policies to employees in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.
The company must also identify a liaison to help employees communicate with and submit requests or claims to the third-party administrator, which addresses the gap at the center of the lawsuit. Butterball will train its human resources and benefits employees on the ADA and provide periodic reports to the EEOC. The announcement does not describe how the $230,000 will be paid out.
Cancer, work and money for older employees
The EEOC’s guidance on cancer in the workplace and the ADA says that, after the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, people who currently have cancer, or whose cancer is in remission, should easily be found to have a disability under the law because they are substantially limited in the major life activity of normal cell growth. People with a history of cancer are also covered. Title I of the ADA applies to private employers with 15 or more employees, and many state laws cover smaller employers.
For long-tenured workers in their 50s and 60s, losing a job in the middle of treatment can hit several parts of a household budget at once: a paycheck, employer health coverage, and retirement contributions that may be hard to make up before retirement. The EEOC guidance notes that an employee who needs intermittent leave or a modified schedule as an accommodation may also be entitled to leave under the FMLA.
The Butterball settlement covers the employee in this lawsuit and does not open a claims process for others. Workers who believe they were denied an accommodation or fired because of a disability must act quickly. EEOC guidance says a charge generally must be filed within 180 calendar days of the discrimination, extended to 300 days where a state or local agency enforces a similar law. The agency’s charge line is 1-800-669-4000.
When a case turns on a paper trail of dates
The Butterball lawsuit came down to a sequence: a diagnosis shared, a leave request passed to an administrator, absences counted as points, and a termination. When any money follows a case like this, it arrives with its own notice and dates that are easy to lose in the middle of treatment and a job change.
The Settlement & Refund Recovery System includes the four-date rule for reading a settlement notice and the scam-proof rules for spotting anyone who asks for a fee to collect money that is already owed.
Keep those dates in order with The Settlement & Refund Recovery System.
This article was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed against the linked official sources.
