The EEOC's first PWFA settlement is here — and it cost $50,000 over a 2-month job swap
On Tuesday, Wabash National Corp. and the EEOC asked a Kentucky federal judge to approve a consent decree resolving the agency's first-ever lawsuit under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The price tag: $50,000, a rewrite of the company's pregnancy accommodation policies, a public anti-discrimination statement on its careers page, and PWFA/Title VII/ADA training for every manager and HR professional at its facilities nationwide.
Here is what the underlying request was:
Hayley Knight was a front-plate assembler. Seven months pregnant, she was in pain from repeatedly bending over the tops of tractor trailers, and she was worried the strain was putting her pregnancy at risk. She asked to move to a different position on the same assembly line.
Coworkers were reportedly willing to trade with her. The company had given light-duty assignments to other employees with injuries. According to the EEOC's complaint, Wabash never assessed whether it could accommodate her at all — it put her on unpaid leave immediately, then handed her an ADA questionnaire. Her doctor filled it out honestly: her pregnancy was not a disability. Wabash told her she had to return to the line. She resigned rather than risk her pregnancy.
That's the case. A position swap that other employees were volunteering for became a federal lawsuit, a consent decree, and nationwide mandatory training.
This is not a surprise, and it should not be treated as one
I have been telling clients and audiences for three years that PWFA enforcement was coming and that the first wave would not involve exotic facts. The statute took effect in June 2023. The EEOC filed this complaint in September 2024. The charge volume has been building the entire time. What we are seeing now is the enforcement pipeline finally emptying into consent decrees — and there are more coming.
If you have been waiting to see "how courts interpret the PWFA" before updating your process, the first data point is in, and it is not about interpretation. It is about employers not running the analysis at all.
The single most expensive mistake: processing a PWFA request as an ADA request
Wabash asked a medical provider the wrong question — is this a disability? — got the honest answer no, and treated that as the end of the inquiry. Under the ADA, that answer often is the end of the inquiry. Under the PWFA, it is irrelevant.
The PWFA is a separate statute with a deliberately lower threshold:
The trigger is a "known limitation" — a physical or mental condition related to, affected by, or arising out of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions that the employee has communicated to the employer. It does not have to be a disability. The EEOC's rule expressly says the limitation may be modest, minor, or episodic.
An employee is still "qualified" even if she temporarily cannot perform an essential function, so long as she can resume it in the near future and the inability can be reasonably accommodated. There is no ADA analogue to this.
Leave is not a default answer. An employer may not force an employee onto leave when another reasonable accommodation is available. Wabash's unpaid-leave-first response is precisely the conduct the statute was written to stop.
Practically: if your intake form, your third-party administrator, or your HR playbook routes a pregnancy request into the ADA workflow, you are asking a question whose answer cannot lawfully resolve the request. These cases are a dime a dozen right now for exactly this reason.
The liability is almost always sitting in the easy ask
Look at what was actually requested across the PWFA matters currently in the pipeline: a temporary transfer, temporary light duty, a stool, more frequent restroom breaks, a lifting cap for a few weeks, a schedule shift for appointments. Low-cost, short-duration, frequently already granted to injured workers.
That last point matters enormously. Wabash had given light duty to employees with injuries and denied it here. Once you have accommodated a comparable non-pregnancy limitation, your undue-hardship defense is largely gone — and you have handed the agency a Title VII pregnancy discrimination claim on top of the PWFA claim.
Six-figure exposure rarely comes from a genuinely hard accommodation. It comes from an easy one that nobody bothered to evaluate.
Some workplaces genuinely are harder — and that's the next conversation
I want to be fair about this: an assembly line is not a desk. Manufacturing, healthcare, warehousing, transportation, and many other employers face real constraints — safety-sensitive functions, physical minimums, OSHA obligations, light-duty pools that are already full of workers' comp cases. The answer is not always yes, and the analysis is genuinely harder than it is for an in-office employee.
That is the part nobody is walking employers through, so I'm doing a complimentary webinar on the hard cases in the coming weeks — asking the tough questions to determine whether the essential function really can't be suspended, and how to document an undue hardship finding that will actually hold up.
Date coming soon — stay tuned.
Before that: two things to check this week
Pull your accommodation intake form. If pregnancy requests hit an ADA-disability question, fix it now.
Confirm someone is trained to run a PWFA analysis that is separate from the ADA analysis.
Questions about a request currently on your desk? Contact me.
Source: Grace Elletson, "Tractor Trailer Maker Settles EEOC's First PWFA Suit," Law360 (Aug. 12, 2026); EEOC v. Wabash National Corp., No. 5:24-cv-00148 (W.D. Ky.).
