While it is illegal to retaliate against an employee who has filed a workers’ comp claim, in Tennessee at least, it is not illegal to turn down an applicant because of their past history with workers’ comp claims.

Kighwuanda Yardley worked as a housekeeping aide at the University Medical Center when she was injured in 2010 and filed a workers’ comp claim. She eventually returned to full-duty in 2012 around the same time the hospital decided to contract with Hospital Housekeeping Systems L.L.C., who would provide their own nurses. They told the University Medical Center they would interview current workers but they did not guarantee they would rehire them.

Yardley was interviewed by the incoming company, but they decided not to hire her because of her past injury and a possible re-aggravation of her injury, or a “workers’ comp claim waiting to happen” according to an internal email.

She sued the company, saying that this practice would potentially discourage employees from filing workers’ comp claims if they thought possible future employers would be averse to hiring them as a result of their comp claim history. She said that such a practice “deprived [workers] of their rightful remedies” of workers’ comp. The company argued that Yardley was not even an employee so they had no legal obligation to her.

The Nashville District Court agreed, and said there is no existing law that prevents “retaliatory failure to hire.” They may still be vulnerable to a disability discrimination claim, because those statutes extend to applicants and say that employers cannot see an applicant as “disabled”.

There are only a few states which have laws against this hiring discrimination- Florida, Louisiana, Maine and Massachusetts.