She needed a comfortable chair. The California EDD’s incompetence made her a millionaire

How do you turn a $1,200 office chair into a $2.1 million legal settlement? No, this is not a joke. Sadly, this is your state government at work — and the latest debacle for the Employment Development Department.

If you’re a California taxpayer, you might want to have a seat.

“The dispute started when Laura Torres, an office assistant in San Francisco, requested a specific chair — the Verte Model 22111 — after returning to work from a back surgery,” reports Wes Venteicher, The Sacramento Bee’s State Worker reporter.

Torres, who suffers from a painful condition called spinal stenosis and was hired in 2010 as part of a special program to recruit people with disabilities, said she needed the office chair in order to work without pain. After a surgery in 2011, a doctor wrote a note to Torres’ state bosses recommending that her employer buy the chair so she could work without pain.

“An online ad for the Verte chair says it features ‘springloaded joints that take an exact spine impression which can be locked in place at the touch of a lever,’” Venteicher reported, noting that the chair had “the tail bone section cut out.”

Instead, the EDD refused to accommodate Torres’ need for the special chair and suggested cheaper alternatives. But after the legal battle that ensued, the bargain chair turned out to be more expensive than anyone could have imagined.

Torres rejected the cheaper chair, saying it caused her pain. She then went out on medical leave and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“The department finally bought the Verte chair in October 2011, and Torres returned to work for four hours per day,” Venteicher wrote.

Back at work, Torres asked for further accommodation. Specifically, she asked to be taken off of switchboard duty, routing phone calls, because it impeded her need to use the restroom frequently due to her condition. Torres said the EDD accommodated her request and moved her to other duties.

Torres said this changed after an EEOC investigator followed up on her claims that the EDD had discriminated against her by delaying its purchase of the chair. Her bosses at EDD switched her back to switchboard duty. Torres saw this as retaliation, but EDD’s lawyers say answering phones was simply part of her job.

Torres said she cried every day, worried about having an accident if she couldn’t make it to the restroom in time.

One day, she said, it finally happened.

“My worst fear came true,” she said. “Here I am, 42 years old, and I wet my pants at work.”

When the EDD still refused to take her off of switchboard duty, Torres said she lost 50 pounds because she stopped eating and drinking during her shifts to avoid another accident.

In 2013, the EEOC ruled in Torres’ favor in the initial complaint about the chair. Shortly afterward, she took another medical leave due to back pain and was out of the office sporadically until October 2016. She never returned to work after her supervisor, Robert Leeds, denied her request for another extension of medical leave.

Today, Torres is happy in a new job in the private sector — and the state just agreed to pay her $2.1 million to settle her legal claims of retaliation. This hardly seems fair to taxpayers, since answering phones does not seem like too much to ask from a state worker whose job title includes such duties.

The fault for this debacle, however, lies with the EDD. All Torres wanted was a simple piece of equipment to make her job less painful. Yet her supervisor’s unwise decision to deny the $1,200 request ultimately made her a millionaire.

Your tax dollars at work.

This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "She needed a comfortable chair. The California EDD’s incompetence made her a millionaire."