Atlanta & Local Affairs
Exel Inc., a logistics company doing business as DHL Supply Chain, has agreed to pay $80,000 and provide other relief to settle a federal disability-discrimination lawsuit involving its Forest Park, Georgia, logistics center, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced September 23. A settlement resolves the litigation; it is not an admission of every allegation.
What the EEOC alleged
According to the agency, a temporary employee at the Forest Park center has sickle cell disorder, which can be triggered by extreme cold. In January 2023, when a new supervisor assigned her to work only in the cooler, she asked to work in the cooler for shorter periods or to be assigned to one of two other available assignments that did not require entering it. The EEOC said she had worked in the non-cooler assignments for most of her employment with Exel.
Exel denied the request and said it does not accommodate medical restrictions, the agency alleged, and discharged her shortly afterward. The EEOC also charged that Exel later hired all of its other temporary employees for full-time positions except her.
“Exel inexplicably refused to provide an available accommodation to a worker who had been successfully performing her job and then discharged her,” said Marcus G. Keegan, regional attorney for the EEOC’s Atlanta District Office.
The EEOC filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division (Civil Action No. 1:26-cv-01720), after first attempting to settle through its conciliation process. Exel is headquartered in Westerville, Ohio.
Terms beyond the payment
Under the consent decree, Exel must post a notice at the Forest Park logistics center, provide periodic reports on how it handles future accommodation requests there, revise the center’s employee handbook to explain how to request a reasonable accommodation, and train relevant managers on their obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the agency. The announcement does not state how long the decree lasts.
What it means locally
Distribution centers often contain very different working environments under one roof, from cold storage to ordinary loading and inventory areas. That does not mean every reassignment is possible in every case; an accommodation decision requires a fact-specific look at the worker, the essential functions of the job and the alternatives available. For metro Atlanta logistics employers, the concrete lesson is how accommodation requests reach someone who can act on them, and whether supervisors know the process.
The case concerns one Forest Park site. It is not a statewide enforcement total, a layoff or a hiring campaign.
Sources
- U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “International Logistics Company Exel to Pay $80,000 to Settle EEOC Disability Lawsuit,” September 23, 2026. https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/international-logistics-company-exel-pay-80000-settle-eeoc-disability-lawsuit
Featured photo: Inside a DHL warehouse in Wommelgem, Belgium. Representative image of logistics warehouse work; it is not the Forest Park site. Photo: Jemimus, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Cropped from the original.
