The European Court of Justice has said in a ruling that obesity can be considered a disability, which can change the way employers in Europe treat overweight staff.
Under the Employment Equality Directive, bosses must provide obese employees with larger seats, special parking spaces and other facilities to accommodate their "disability," the Washington Times reported.
While no general principle of European Union law prohibits, in itself, discrimination on grounds of obesity, that condition falls within the concept of "disability" where, under particular conditions, it hinders the full and effective participation of the person concerned in professional life on an equal basis with other workers, the court ruled.
The court added that the directive has the object of implementing equal treatment and aims in particular to enable a person with a disability to have access to or participate in employment, in addition, it would run counter to the aim of the directive if its application was dependent on the origin of the disability.
The ruling comes after a law suit was brought by a Danish nanny, Karsten Kaltoft, who was fired from his job earlier in 2014 for being too immobile to tie a kid's shoe laces.
Kaltoft, who now works as a truck driver, said it is good that people now recognize that obesity can be a handicap and he hopes that municipality realize that is was not okay to fire him.
Kaltoft added that he never saw it as a requirement that he needed to lose weight and never had a feeling that it could cost him the job.
Julian Hemming, employment partner at law firm Osborne Clarke said that this test could mean that businesses face claims from obese staff for failing to make reasonable adjustments to their role if the job entails tasks where they would be on an unequal footing with other staff, tasks that require full mobility such as stacking shelves in a supermarket for example.
