This Bad Boss Stalled on a Disabled Employee’s Accommodation — and Later Found a Way to Remove It
Donna Poplar arrived at her new job as HR director for the Genesee County Road Commission in Flint, Mich., with a blind right eye, glaucoma in her left eye, and a request: For GCRC to hire a part-time reader to help manage her resulting eye strain.
The ask was routine under Michigan disability law, which explicitly allows for such accommodation.
At first Poplar made her request informally. Then, after 18 months of inaction and worsening pain, she put it in writing. That was around the time she got a new boss, Fred Peivandi, a longtime GCRC employee who proceeded to slow-walk relief for Poplar, implying that no one would ever have hired her in “the real world” — as opposed to government work — according to later court testimony.
A complaint from Poplar forced the matter and got her an assistant. But it also turned things “frosty” with her boss, jurors heard during a trial. Clashes continued, including claims of race discrimination, and Peivandi eventually suspended Poplar for violating a directive that he had issued, by his own testimony, to show her “who is the boss.”
Peivandi then turned Poplar’s absence into a longer leave and, while she was gone, promoted her reader/assistant into a different job. When the HR director returned, Peivandi refused to backfill the assistant position, seemingly just because he “did not want to,” according to a panel of judges. Poplar’s eyesight continued to suffer.
Fred Peivandi is our Bad Boss of the Month.
Poplar sued the Genesee County Road Commission for failure to accommodate her disability under Michigan’s Persons with Disabilities Civil Rights Act (PWDCRA) and for retaliation under multiple laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. She also claimed race bias, but those claims were dismissed during litigation.
In 2023, after an eight-day trial, a federal jury awarded Poplar $800,000 in damages. GCRC lost an appeal, and the case was settled late last year.
By the time she joined GCRC in 2016, Poplar already had a long career in public service in Genesee County, the birthplace of General Motors. With a master’s degree that included a concentration in human resources, she had held jobs in both city and county government; her last job before GCRC was as HR director for the City of Flint.
As the jury heard, Poplar had suffered from vision problems since childhood. Her right eye became permanently blind in 2009; she has chronic open-angle glaucoma in her left eye. In previous jobs, she’d always had the help of an assistant or secretary, she testified, and she was upfront about her condition when interviewing at GCRC. Court documents show that she asked her original GCRC boss for accommodations on her very first day.
Some of her requests were easily granted: a larger computer screen, dimmer office lights, and a closer parking space. But before long Poplar also asked for assistance with reading and computer work — a type of assistance that’s prominently namechecked under the Michigan PWDCRA, which refers repeatedly to hiring “readers” as a potential accommodation.
In this case, Poplar told the jury, the overworked HR department needed an extra hand anyway; a new assistant could help Poplar and lighten the load for everyone else. GCRC’s board budgeted for a part-time position in January 2017, according to court documents, but didn’t immediately greenlight the hiring.
More than two years would pass before the slot was filled.
In the meantime, GCRC’s decision to hire Poplar seemed to pay off. Jurors heard that her initiatives saved the commission more than $300,000. Long-neglected tasks finally got done: Work rules for employees, for instance, were revised for the first time in more than four decades. An HR audit was conducted for the first time ever, Poplar testified.
But the progress came at a personal cost, Poplar told jurors: She had severe eye pain and deteriorating vision in her non-blind eye. She tried using medicated eye drops to relieve the suffering, but to little avail.
Until this point, Poplar had made her accommodation requests orally and informally. But “when I got to the point where I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she testified, “I … put it in writing” with a formal request to hire a reader. Shortly afterward, when longtime GCRC employee Fred Peivandi became her new boss, she reiterated the request to him by email.
The two managers already had a tense relationship: Poplar had opposed Peivandi’s elevation, according to court records. Now the new boss slow-walked Poplar’s formal request. According to GCRC court filings, Peivandi proposed a “needs study,” argued about the pay rate, and warned against making Poplar’s assistant full-time, a move that Poplar favored — but that wasn’t on the table at the time.
In their initial discussion about Poplar’s accommodation, Peivandi testified, he asked her, “Why should I hire two people to do one job?” Poplar said his phrasing was even harsher; either way, she took him to mean that GCRC shouldn’t hire people who require accommodation, she testified.
Incensed, she tried to get Peivandi to repeat his words — and she secretly recorded the resulting conversation, according to testimony.
“I’m talking about — in the real world, I’m talking about,” Peivandi says on the court-filed transcript. “I mean, it’s just a fact of life. … If I own a [private] company, just between you and I … who would you hire? … You’re not going to hire somebody that’s going to take one-and-a-half persons to do the job, or two people to do the job. … The real world. Okay?”
Poplar argued back, warning him never to repeat that to anyone with a disability, but Peivandi claimed that he was merely being “straightforward.”
“I’m so open, so transparent … I mean, that’s the truth,” he says. “I didn’t mean to offend you at all … I was just giving you the reality of the world in private business, a private company.”
Six months after Peivandi’s arrival, the assistant position was still unfilled. Fed up, Poplar filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming both disability and race discrimination. The move was effective: GCRC finally hired the part-time assistant.
Irritations between Peivandi and Poplar escalated, however, in part because Poplar quickly pushed for her assistant to become full-time to address office-wide workload issues — and she got her wish by going over her boss’s head to the GCRC board, according to court documents.
There were other sources of tension. A Black employee had accused GCRC of race discrimination for its promotion of Peivandi, an Iranian American immigrant. Poplar, who is Black, also saw troubling signs at work, she testified during litigation. Once, Peivandi had asked her to compile a list of GCRC employees that included their race. He didn’t explain why, she testified, but she claimed that she saw him consulting the list when he made disciplinary decisions.
In late 2020, Poplar was called to provide a deposition in the employee’s discrimination lawsuit. She did so under protest, she said at the time, fearing retaliation from GCRC and Peivandi — and her testimony was incendiary, claiming that her boss’s “anger and dislike toward African American people, especially African American men” was both cultural and based on some family circumstances.
Peivandi, in turn, testified that he was “upset” by Poplar’s invocation of his personal life, which he said was irrelevant to the case — and he told her of those feelings. From that point forward, Poplar told jurors, Peivandi “turned up the heat” on her at work. “I couldn’t do anything to satisfy [him] at that point,” she testified.
After a few months of conflict, Poplar filed an internal complaint with GCRC’s board — which by now had supported her against Peivandi several times — and accused her boss of creating a hostile work environment. A two-month investigation, however, concluded that Peivandi hadn’t shown race bias and that he and Poplar were just struggling for control in a “turf war,” according to court filings.
Peivandi immediately set new rules to knock the HR director into line. Among other things, the court heard, he told her to raise all work concerns with him first; to comply fully with all his directives; and to defer to him on hiring and firing matters. Peivandi testified that he wanted “to have something in writing for her to understand who is the boss here.”
Not long after, Poplar and Peivandi clashed over COVID masking policy. Poplar sent out a staff-wide memo that Peivandi believed misrepresented his position. In response, he suspended her for two weeks without pay. Poplar then went to the GCRC board to dispute her punishment; Peivandi put her on paid administrative leave to create a “cooling-off period” and to allow the board to decide on next steps. With Poplar temporarily out of the way, Peivandi quickly promoted her assistant — who had previously spent several hours a day helping the HR director to avoid eye strain — into a different role that didn’t include the reading tasks.
The GCRC board returned Poplar to work after two months, now with an intermediate manager to serve as a buffer between her and Peivandi. She immediately asked for a new assistant to help with reading — but to no avail. GCRC simply “did not fill the vacancy, seemingly because Peivandi ‘did not want to,'” according to an opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Poplar continued to work without any help on reading tasks, she testified, convinced that GCRC was trying to force her to quit. The trial jury heard that her eyesight got worse as a result, and a psychiatrist testified that Poplar also suffered from work-related anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. “She felt hopeless,” he told the court. “She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t focus.” He insisted that Poplar take medical leave, he testified.
It was for these harms that the jury awarded most of Poplar’s $800,000 in damages. The resulting judgment was affirmed by the Sixth Circuit; the case was fully resolved via a consent order late last year. Poplar was still GCRC’s HR director when the appellate opinion was filed — and she had no reader to accommodate her disability “to this day,” according to that opinion.
Peivandi, meanwhile, retired a month before the trial. He told local media that he left “on my own terms,” and not as a result of multiple controversies that included the hiring of a dog trainer to teach GCRC employees about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
» Read a transcript of the secretly recorded meeting between Poplar and Peivandi
The Employment Law Group® law firm was not involved in Poplar v. Genesee County Road Commission. We select “Bad Boss” cases to illustrate the continuing relevance of employee protection laws for our newsletter’s audience, which includes attorneys and former TELG clients.
Poplar was represented by Sommers Schwartz and Lee Legal Group, PLLC.