"Do I have to tell a new employer?"

What the law limits

California's Fair Employment and Housing Act restricts pre-offer medical and disability inquiries. A prospective employer generally may not ask about your medical history or your disability status before making a conditional offer of employment.

After a conditional offer, medical inquiries and examinations are permitted in narrower circumstances — generally where they are job-related, consistent with business necessity, and applied uniformly to everyone in the same job category.

And an employer that withdraws an offer because of a disability, without engaging in the interactive process and considering reasonable accommodation, may be violating FEHA — which, unlike § 132a, has no $10,000 cap and provides emotional distress damages, punitive damages, and attorney's fees. More.

Where honesty matters

If you are asked a direct question on a post-offer medical questionnaire, answer it truthfully.

A false statement on a medical history form can create real problems later — including in a future workers' compensation claim, where credibility decides every disputed medical question. It is not worth it.

And note this cuts in your favor more often than people expect. A documented pre-existing condition is not a defense to a new industrial injury. Apportionment is to disability, not to history — and a prior disability may open a SIBTF claim, which is money in addition to what the employer owes. More.

Two practical points

Your current claim does not follow you to a new job. It stays with the employer and carrier where the injury occurred. Starting a new job does not end it.

But a new injury at the new job is a new claim, with its own date of injury — and if the same body part is involved, expect an apportionment fight between the two. That is normal, it is resolvable, and it is a reason to have both claims looked at together rather than separately.

And if the new work aggravates the old injury, that may be a new cumulative trauma claim in its own right. How.

We are workers' compensation attorneys. Questions about what a specific employer may lawfully ask, and about disclosure in a hiring process, are employment law questions. Where a job offer has been withdrawn or an accommodation refused, that is worth a separate look.