A Burnaby school district plumber’s discrimination complaint has been dismissed by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal without a hearing, according to an Oct. 18 decision posted on the tribunal’s website.
Wayne Carr, a School District No. 41 plumber since May 2006, filed a complaint saying the district had discriminated against him because of a physical disability he sustained after injuring himself stepping out of his work van in September 2014.
Carr said the district did not accommodate his return to work.
The school board, however, argued it had offered the plumber retraining as a custodian and an education assistant, as well as for a clerical position, after a February 2015 WorkSafeBC decision ruled Carr’s limitations would prevent him from returning to his pre-injury job.
The board said it did not have sufficient light duties for a full-time plumbing job for Carr, who, as of March 2015, was performing about 10 to 20 per cent of the work requirements of a full-time position, according to the board.
According to the ruling, the board told WorkSafe in March 2015 that the district had 300 urgent work order requisitions in a backlog and only three remaining full-time plumbers taking care of 54 sites and well over 1,500 fixtures.
Carr argued the board did not offer him a clerical position and that he would have taken one if it had been offered.
He rejected the custodian and education assistant’s jobs, he said, because custodians have to move heavy furniture, skids of boxes of copy paper and other heavy supplies, and education assistant jobs can require moving children, desks and furniture – none of which was possible given his physical limitations.
Carr said he also rejected the positions because neither was full-time or at the same rate of pay as a plumber.
In his nine years with the district, Carr had filed about 20 workers’ compensation claims for various incidents, according to the ruling, and the board argued it had regularly accommodated him by modifying his duties, providing graduated returns to work or by providing him with specialized protective equipment.
Carr agreed that, prior to the latest incident, he had never complained before that the board had failed to accommodate him.
In her decision, tribunal member Marlene Tyshynski said there was no reasonable prospect Carr’s complaint could succeed if it went to a hearing.
“…I am persuaded that the Board will be able to prove that it made a reasonable offer to accommodate Mr. Carr’s return to work,” she wrote. “Faced with Mr. Carr’s physical limitations and WorkSafeBC’s decision that Mr. Carr was permanently disabled and not able to return to work in his former position, the Board’s offer to train him into other positions was reasonable enough for him to at least try to see if he could perform them, possibly on a modified basis if necessary.”
