After Jimmy Dale Lee suffered a back injury that left him unable to perform heavy physical labor, the City of Salem, Indiana (“Salem” or the “city”) discharged him from his position as sexton of the city’s cemetery. Lee sued the city pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), 42 U.S.C. § 12101, contending that he remained able to perform his work with or without accommodation. A jury found in his favor and awarded him damages. In the interim between his discharge and the trial, however, Lee had sought and obtained disability benefits, asserting in his application that he was unable to perform his past work as a sexton. When queried about the discrepancy at trial, Lee explained that although he was, in fact, able to perform his work, he had applied for benefits and claimed an inability to work because his disability had been “hammered into [his] head” and “[he] believed that was the only thing to do, sign up for disability.” R. 126 at 64-65. As a matter of law, we find that explanation insufficient to satisfy the criteria established by
Cleveland v. Policy Mgmnt. Sys. Corp.,
I.
Lee prevailed below after a full trial. We therefore recount the facts in the light most helpful to him, resolving testimonial conflicts in his favor and granting him the benefit of any inferences that the jury reasonably might have drawn from the evidence.
E.g., Jannotta v. Subway Sand
*669
wich Shops, Inc.,
Lee began work at Salem’s Crown Hill Cemetery in 1978 and became sexton in 1992. He and the other cemetery workers prepared grave sites, tended the lawn with mowers and weed-eaters, and on occasion moved headstones. As sexton, Lee scheduled and supervised the labor of the small cemetery workforce, which included two full-time employees and himself, as well as a number of extra workers (up to four) who were hired during the summer months. He also sold burial plots, recorded the requisite information for burial permits, and directed people to grave sites.
In April 1994, Lee fell from a stand of bleachers while attending a race at a local speedway. He suffered several herniated disks as a result and underwent surgery to repair’ the damage. In March of 1995, Lee applied for Social Security Disability Insurance (“SSDI”) benefits, indicating that he was unable to work. On December 29, 1995, following an evidentiary hearing, an administrative law judge (“ALJ”) retroactively awarded Lee benefits for a closed period of disability commencing on the date of his injury and ending on August 13, 1995. Def. Ex. E.
On August 14, 1995, Lee returned to his job at the cemetery. His doctor had restricted him to light duty pending what was expected to be a complete recovery. Lee was not to lift more than 10 pounds, he was to avoid sitting for more than 30 minutes at a time, and he was not to engage in any repetitive bending. Def. Exs. H, I. According to Lee, even with these limitations, he was able to perform most, if not all, of the tasks associated with his position as sexton, and of course other employees were able to handle the heavy lifting. In May 1996, however, Lee’s physician determined that he would never be able to again perform heavy physical labor and prepared a disability form making his light-duty restrictions permanent. Def. Ex. J. Lee believed he was fully capable of staying on as sexton, and until this time, no one at the city had questioned his ability to do so.
Once Lee’s limitations were deemed permanent, however, the city’s position changed. Salem’s clerk-treasurer, Judy Chastain, told Lee’s wife Pam that when she delivered a copy of Lee’s disability form to the city’s mayor, Douglas Campbell, he remarked “Thank you very much, this is exactly what I need.” R. 126 at 88. Mrs. Lee understood this to mean that Campbell viewed the letter as ammunition against her husband. A city councilman subsequently remarked to Lee’s father-in-law that “they was going to have a council meeting, that Jimmy Lee was crippled, [and] they was going to have to get shed of him.” Id. at 156. When the council subsequently met in executive session on June 10, 1996, Mayor Campbell informed council members of Lee’s permanent restrictions. They, in turn, decided to discharge Lee and instructed the mayor to explore the possibility of offering Lee employment elsewhere within the city’s workforce. 1
At a subsequent, public meeting on June 25, the city’s attorney explained to the council that the ADA required it to identify the essential functions of Lee’s position, to consider whether Lee was able to perform those functions, and, if not, to consider whether the city could make any accommodations that would enable Lee to continue working without posing an undue burden upon the city. Heeding their *670 counsel’s advice, the council determined first that the essential functions of the sexton position included record management, grave sales, mowing, backhoe operation, general maintenance and labor, and supervision of labor. The four council members present (one did not attend the meeting) then discussed whether Lee could perform each of these functions under the permanent restrictions articulated by his physician and concluded, unanimously, that he could not. After concluding that no reasonable accommodation was possible, the council voted (again, unanimously) to relieve Lee of his position. Lee and his attorney were present at this meeting. Lee told the council that he was able to continue on as sexton, and that the list of functions that council members had deemed essential to the position were not consistent with the duties historically associated with the position. Each of the funeral directors who used the cemetery, as well as a cemetery customer and a number of Lee’s co-workers, also indicated that the cemetery was functioning satisfactorily with Lee in charge. Nonetheless, the council removed Lee from the post.
At its June 10th meeting, the council had authorized Mayor Campbell to offer Lee a job as a police dispatcher. Campbell mentioned the job to Lee, but the city council never went so far as to offer him the position. After voting to discharge Lee at the June 25th meeting, the council did provide for the creation of a part-time position for Lee at the cemetery entailing the management of cemetery records, lot sales, coordination with funeral directors, and working with the general public. Campbell was instructed to work out the details with Lee. Nothing came of this proposal either. As of July 15, 1996, Lee was discharged from the city’s employ.
After losing his job, Lee sought disability benefits for the second time. A disability report dated August 12, 1996 indicated that he had been disabled since July 15, 1996, the final day of his employment with Salem. The report described the permanent restrictions that his physician had imposed on him and indicated that he was in “constant pain.” Pl.’s Ex. 8 at 1. The report also indicated that Lee had attempted to return to work, but that “they wouldn’t let me operate the heavy equipment anymore, i.e., backhoe, mowing tractor, dump trucks.” Id. The final section of the report contained the following remarks:
I was awarded a closed period of disability in Jan. of 1996. I went back to work to see if I couldn’t handle it but I couldn’t do the work anymore. It was too strenuous for me and my back pain is just too great to keep agrivating [sic] it every day. I gave it my best try.
Id. at 6. Just below these remarks, Lee signed the report. A heading adjacent to the signature line stated: “Knowing that anyone making a false statement or representation of material fact for use in determining a right to payment under the Social Security Act commits a crime punishable under Federal law, I certify that the above statements are true.” Id.; see 18 U.S.C. § 1001; 42 U.S.C. § 408.
Following the initial denial of his claim, Lee requested a hearing before an ALJ, stating in part that “I feel I am disabled and unable to work due to the severity of my back problem.” Def. Ex. D. The ALJ held in Lee’s favor and awarded him benefits commencing as of July 15, 1996. Def. Ex. G. Among other things, the ALJ found that (1) Lee suffered from degenerative disc disease that “prevents the claimant from performing anything but a drastically restricted range of sedentary work”; (2) he “cannot perform his past relevant work and does not have transferable skills to perform other work within his residual *671 functional capacity”; and (3) “there are no jobs existing in significant numbers that the claimant is capable of performing.” Id., Decision at 2.
In June 1997, while his application for disability benefits was pending, Lee filed suit contending that the city’s handling of his disability violated the ADA. He sued Campbell as well as the city, alleging that the mayor had tortiously interfered with his employment contract.
At trial, Lee was asked about the assertions in his signed disability report that he “couldn’t do the work anymore,” that his job as sexton was “too strenuous for [him]” and that his “back pain was just too great to keep [aggravating it] every day.” “Was that true when you signed that form?” Lee’s attorney asked him.
A. I believe[d] it to be true, yes.
Q. Is it true today?
A. I don’t agree with it, no.
Q. Why don’t you agree?
A. Well, again, all the pressure was on and I believe I could do the job.
Q. Do you believe you could do the job today?
A. Yes, yeah.
Q. Do you believe you could do the job with your restrictions today?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you believe that you could do the job back in June of 1996?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you believe you were doing the job?
A. Yes, I believe I was doing the job very well.
Q. Were there any parts of your job that because of your restrictions you totally couldn’t do?
A. No.
Q. What made you able to do that job with your restrictions?
A. Well, I mean, as far as, you know, I know how to do the job. I had done it long enough, the past experience and everything, it was — I could figure out how to do the job somehow or another.
Q. Did you get the job done?
A. Yeah, I done my job, yes.
R. 126 at 49-50. On cross-examination, Lee indicated that he had not filled out the disability report himself, but rather that a Social Security representative had done so on his behalf. He acknowledged however, that he told the representative that he “couldn’t do the work anymore.” Id. at 58. Defense counsel asked Lee whether it was true in mid-1997, when he asked for a hearing on his claim, that he was unable to work.
A. I did my work. I felt the reason I made those statements was that everybody kept hammering me and saying you were disabled, and whatever, and then these people, that is what they do is write it up for — they write out the request for you. And I feel like I had no other just thing to do but just agree, you know, file for disability. That is what was hammered in my head.
Id. at 62-63. Lee sounded the same note when he was asked about the ALJ’s finding, in December of 1997, that he was unable to perform his past work:
Q. And do you agree with that, that as of December of 1997, you were unable to perform, quote “[y]our past relevant work”?
A. At the time I did that I believed that because it was hammered into my head, but now I’m not.
Q. I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that[.]
A. But no, now I don’t agree with it, no.
*672 Q. You do now, but — you don’t now, but you did then?
A. I was fired from my job because of that reason and I believed that was the only thing to do, sign up for disability.
Id. at 64-65.
At the close of Lee’s case, the city asked the court to enter judgment as a matter of law in its favor on the ADA claim pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. Relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in Cleveland v. Policy Mgmnt Sys. Corp., supra, decided just three weeks earlier, the city contended that Lee was obliged to explain the apparent discrepancy between his successful application for disability benefits — which posited that he was unable to perform his past work as a sexton — and his ADA claim — which posited that he was still able to perform the essential functions of the job. R. 126 at 204-05. The court took the motion under advisement. Id. at 211. The city renewed its motion at the end of the ease, but the court denied the motion. R. 97. The jury found in favor of Lee on the ADA claim, in favor of Campbell on the tortious interference claim, and awarded Lee $112,000 in lost wages and benefits, $50,000 for emotional distress, and punitive damages of $50,000. R. 99. On post-trial motions, the district court struck the award of punitive damages, denied Lee’s request for an order reinstating him to his job, and granted Lee $8,082.30 in front pay as well as attorney’s fees and costs of $24,672.94, bringing the total award to Lee to $194,755.24. R. 115, 116, 127. Although Salem again argued that it was entitled to judgment as a matter of law based on Lee’s prior claim' of total disability (R. 104 at 9, 10-12), the district court again rejected the argument:
The jury disagreed with the City’s position, and found that Lee, with or without reasonable accommodation, could perform [the physical duties of sexton]. Viewing the evidence presented at trial in Lee’s favor, as well as drawing all reasonable inferences in his favor, the Court finds that the jury’s conclusion was reasonable.
R. 115 at 10.
II.
Salem attacks the judgment on a variety of grounds, but we need only reach its first and principal argument. When Lee sought disability benefits following his discharge, he represented to the Social Security Administration that he was no longer able to work as a sexton. There is no dispute that this representation, which the ALJ found to be true in awarding Lee benefits, posed an apparent conflict with an essential element of his ADA claim— namely, that he could perform the essential functions of his past work with or without reasonable accommodation.
Cleveland v. Policy Mgmnt. Sys. Corp.,
A.
Whereas the Social Security Act provides an income to disabled persons who cannot work, the ADA protects the employment rights of those who can. The separate aims of the two statutes are reflected in their criteria. In order to qualify for disability benefits, an individual must show both that he is “unable to do his previous work” and that he “cannot ... engage in any other kind of substantial gainful work which exists in the national economy[.]” 42 U.S.C. § 423(d)(2)(A).
*673
But in order to establish a prima facie case of discrimination under the ADA, one must show that he is a “qualified individual with a disability,” that is, one who can, notwithstanding his disability, perform the essential functions of his job with or without reasonable accommodation. 42 U.S.C. § 12111(8) (emphasis supplied);
see also, e.g., Emerson v. Northern States Power Co.,
The apparent conflict can be reconciled, however, as the Supreme Court recognized in
Cleveland.
The question posed in
Cleveland
was whether one’s successful pursuit of SSDI benefits either estops him from pursuing an ADA claim or triggers a presumption that he is unable to perform the essential functions of his job. The Court unanimously concluded that it does neither of these things. As Justice Breyer explained, the SSA and the ADA do not employ the same criteria in assessing the individual’s ability to work. For example, the ADA envisions that someone with a disability may be able to work, but only with a reasonable accommodation
{e.g.,
job restructuring, reassignment to a different position, part-time work, and so forth). The SSA, on the other hand, does not take potential accommodations into account in assessing one’s ability to continue working.
Yet, as the Court went on to recognize, there are situations in which a successful claim for SSDI benefits will appear to pose a genuine conflict with an ADA claim; and in such cases, the ADA plaintiff may not ignore the seeming conflict.
To defeat summary judgment, that explanation must be sufficient to warrant a reasonable juror’s concluding that, assuming the truth of, or the plaintiffs good faith belief in, the earlier statement, the plaintiff could nonetheless “perform the essential functions” of her job, with or without “reasonable accommodation.”
Id.
at 807,
Cleveland’s analysis suggests that an ADA plaintiff may not, simply by disavowing a prior claim of total disability, perform an about-face and assert that he is a “qualified individual” who is capable of working. Rather, as the language we have just quoted indicates, the plaintiff must proceed from the premise that his previous assertion of an inability to work was true, or that he in good faith believed it to be true, and he must demonstrate that the assertion was nonetheless consistent with his ability to perform the essential functions of his job. Ibid. The key to meeting that burden lies in the very differences between the two statutory schemes that led the Supreme Court to reject a rule foreclosing a cause of action under the ADA to anyone who had previously obtained SSDI benefits. In other words, as we stated in Feldman v. American Mem. Life Ins. Co.:
A plaintiff may declare that she was totally disabled in her SSDI application, then declare that she was a qualified individual under the ADA, but she must show that this apparent inconsistency can be resolved with reference to variance betiveen the definitions of ‘disability’ contemplated by the ADA and SSDI.
*675
B.
The unmistakable import of Lee’s post-termination application for disability benefits is that he was unable to continue working as a cemetery sexton. “I went back to work to see if I couldn’t handle it but I couldn’t do the work anymore,” he told the Social Security Administration. Pl.Ex. 8 at 6. The ALJ’s findings in Lee’s favor likewise reflect this fundamental assertion: the ALJ found that Lee’s injury left him able to perform only a “a drastically restricted range of sedentary work,” that consequently Lee could not perform his past relevant work as a sexton, and that there were no other jobs in significant numbers that Lee was capable of performing. Def. Ex. G, Decision at 2. Lee’s asserted inability to meet the demands of his job thus calls into question whether or not he is a “qualified individual” for purposes of the ADA.
Cleveland,
Lee’s explanation, however, does not turn on the distinctions between the two statutory schemes. Rather than reconciling his claim for disability benefits with the criteria of the ADA, Lee has attempted to abandon altogether the assertions that he made to the Social Security Administration. By Lee’s account at trial, he was doing the job of a sexton at the time Salem discharged him, and was still able to do that work when he re-applied for disability benefits two months later. Even so, he pursued and obtained disability benefits on the premise that he could not return to his past work, because he was convinced that he could not do so: Salem had deemed him unfit to continue on as the city’s sexton, it had been “hammered into [his] head” that he was disabled, and so he simply did the logical thing and applied for benefits. R. 126 at 62-63. “I was fired from my job because of that reason and I believed that was the only thing to do, sign up for disability.” Id. at 65.
We are obliged to review the record in Lee’s favor, and so we accept his testimo *676 ny as true. We may safely assume, in turn, that Lee was not deliberately distorting the truth when he represented that he was unable to return to his job at the city cemetery. Still, the unavoidable implication of his testimony is that what he told the Social Security Administration and the ALJ was imtrue. Yet, the notion that he was no longer able to work as a sexton was obviously crucial to the ALJ’s disability determination. Having secured an award of disability benefits on the strength of that assertion, Lee has turned about and asked a jury, and now this court, to grant him relief based on a wholly contrary view of his ability to work. We reiterate that Lee does not account for his previous statements by explaining, for example, that the SSA does not consider the possibility of reasonable accommodations, so that when he claimed he was unable to return to his job with the city, he was simply saying that he could no longer do that job unless the city accommodated him, which it refused to do. Lee has not attempted to qualify his prior statements at all. Instead, he accepts the natural import of those statements (that he could no longer work as a sexton, period), contends that he so believed at the time he applied for benefits, and indicates that he has since had a change of heart. His brief makes the point succinctly: “Lee was able to do the job, did the job, knew he could do the job, was told he couldn’t do the job, filed for social security, and at the time of trial, told the jury he could do the job.” Lee Br. at 6.
Cleveland
indicates that a sworn statement declaring one’s “total disability” (or the like) can comfortably coexist with an ADA claim asserting the ability to perform the essential functions of the job when the plaintiff proffers “a sufficient explanation” for the seemingly contradictory positions.
We are not saying that under
no
circumstances could the types of representations Lee made to the Social Security Administration have been reconciled with an ADA claim. For example, when Lee averred that his work at the cemetery was “too strenuous” and that his “back pain [was] just too great to keep ag[gra]vating it every day,” he might have meant that he could no longer work as a sexton
unless
he was relieved of the aspects of the job involving physical exertion. Qualified in this way, such statements arguably left room for the notion that Lee was capable of performing the essential functions of the job (provided, of course, that the physically demanding activities themselves were not essential to the position).
See, e.g., Fox v. General Motors Corp.,
Perhaps what Lee wishes to argue is that although his prior statements to the SSA were inaccurate, he reasonably and in good faith believed them to be true based on the city’s own decision that he was no longer able to meet the demands of his job, and so we ought not bind him to a position that, with the benefit of hindsight, he now realizes was a mistake.
Cleveland,
after all, requires the plaintiff to demonstrate how he can perform the essential functions of his job if one “assum[es] the truth of, or
the plaintiff’s good faith belief in,”
the statements he made when seeking disability benefits.
We wish to point out that our holding does not force individuals in Lee’s situation to confront “the Hobson’s choice of disability or poverty.”
Wilson,
III.
Because Lee failed to establish a question of fact with respect to his ability to perform the essential functions of his past work as a sexton, the district court should have entered judgment as a matter of law in favor of Salem. We ReveRse the judgment in favor of Lee and against Salem and Remand the case with directions to enter judgment in the city’s favor.
Notes
. Although the city takes the position that the council did not decide to discharge Lee until its public meeting on June 25, Mayor Campbell's testimony indicates that the council resolved to terminate him from the sexton position on June 10. R. 126 at 112-13.
. The Court limited the scope of its opinion to successful benefit applications:
[I]f an individual has merely applied for, but has not been awarded, SSDI benefits, any inconsistency in the theory of the claims is of the sort normally tolerated by our legal system. Our ordinary rules recognize that a person may not be sure in advance upon which legal theory she will succeed, and so permit parties to "set forth *674 two or more statements of a claim or defense alternately or hypothetically,” and to "state as many separate claims or defenses as the party has regardless of consistency.” Fed. Rule Civ. Proc. 8(3)(2). We do not see why the law in respect to the assertion of SSDI and ADA claims should differ....
.
Cleveland,
like this case, involved prior statements regarding the plaintiffs ability to work — statements which, as noted above, "often imply a context-related legal conclusion” regarding one's eligibility for SSDI benefits.