back injury

fastabby

we have an employee who has a non-work related back injury. Now he says he twisted his back and is saying it is now work related. We received information from his doctor that he was on a 10 pund weight restriction that he had not provided to us. If we had known about the weight restriction he would not have been lifting 45-60 pound loads.
Management wants to terminate for not giving us this info. I'm not 100% comfortable (85-15) with termination.

Paul

There are a couple of other pieces of information that need to be evaluated by your management team before you jump to a termination. Did you do a pre-placement physical exam of the employee? Was the employee given a job description that clearly shows what the lifting requirements would be? Did the employee affirmatively acknowledge that they read and understood the job description and all of the essential functions? Unless you can answer all of the above in the affirmative, you should consider working with the employee through this situation rather than firing them. Do you have a light duty position that the employee could do? Consider the cost to replace and retrain, you might want to consider where else this person might be used.