The job description problem: how getting job classification wrong creates accommodation, workers' comp, and misclassification risk

Writing a job description feels like the simplest task in HR. Someone copies last year’s posting, adds “other duties as assigned,” and moves on. I have watched that simple task become the center of accommodation disputes, workers’ compensation fights, overtime lawsuits, and agency audits. The description written in ten minutes becomes Exhibit A.

A job description is not paperwork. It is the company’s written statement of what the job is. Courts, agencies, doctors, insurers, and candidates all rely on it. When it is accurate, it protects the company and helps it hire well. When it is wrong, it fails in ways most employers never see coming.

First, the upside: talent

A clear, honest description is one of the cheapest recruiting and retention tools a company has. It tells strong candidates exactly what they will do and what success looks like, so the right people apply and the wrong ones self-select out. It sets expectations a manager can coach to and an employee can meet. It shows the path to the next level. People rarely leave a job that turned out to be what they were told. Many leave one that did not.

Now the downside, which is where the legal risk lives.

1. Disability accommodations: the description is evidence

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer must reasonably accommodate a qualified employee who can perform the essential functions of the job. What is essential is often the whole fight. The statute gives the employer’s written job description special weight: if the employer prepared it before advertising or interviewing for the job, it is evidence of the job’s essential functions.

That cuts both ways:

• Missing functions. If lifting 50 pounds, driving, rotating shifts, or being on call is essential but not written down, the company will struggle to prove it later.
• Inflated functions. If the description lists heavy lifting for an office job, the company may screen out or refuse to accommodate someone on the basis of a requirement it cannot defend.
• Marginal duties dressed up as essential. A task done twice a year that someone else could easily cover is rarely essential, whatever the description says.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act raises the stakes. An employee can be “qualified” even if they cannot perform an essential function for a temporary period, if the function can be suspended or reassigned. Under the EEOC’s rule, for a current pregnancy that period is generally presumed to be about 40 weeks. An employer that does not know which functions are truly essential, and which could be set aside for a while, cannot evaluate that request well.

FMLA uses the same building block. An employer can require a fitness-for-duty certification that addresses the employee’s ability to perform the essential functions of the job, but only if it provided a list of those functions with the FMLA designation notice. No accurate list, no meaningful certification.

2. Workers’ compensation: the doctor reads the description too

After a work injury, the treating doctor decides what the employee can do, and the employer decides whether it can offer modified duty. In Texas, a written offer of modified duty can affect the employee’s temporary income benefits, but only if it is a bona fide offer of employment. The rule is strict. The offer must be in writing, include the doctor’s work status report, and describe the location, schedule, wages, and the physical and time requirements of the position. Employers and carriers often get the doctor’s input by sending functional job descriptions that spell out those physical demands.

A description that says “other duties as assigned” and nothing about lifting, standing, or climbing gives the doctor nothing to work with, delays the return to work, and can make a modified-duty offer fail. Accurate physical demands, written down before anyone is hurt, are what make a return-to-work program work.

Classification matters to the premium as well. Workers’ compensation premiums are priced by job classification code and payroll, and carriers audit both. Codes assigned by title rather than by the work people actually do can mean overpaying for years or getting a surprise bill at audit.

3. Overtime: the title does not make the exemption

Calling someone a “manager” or “coordinator” and paying a salary does not make them exempt from overtime. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, most white-collar exemptions require all of the following:

• A salary of at least $684 a week ($35,568 a year), the level the Department of Labor restored in 2026 after a Texas federal court vacated the 2024 increase. The highly compensated employee test uses $107,432 in total annual pay.
• Payment on a salary basis, without deductions that treat the salary like an hourly wage.
• Job duties that actually meet a test: managing a department and directing at least two full-time employees for the executive exemption; office work tied to running the business, with real discretion and independent judgment on significant matters, for the administrative exemption; or work requiring advanced knowledge from prolonged specialized study for the learned professional exemption.

The regulations say plainly that a job title alone is not enough. What counts is what the person does every day. When the description says “supervises the team” but the employee spends 90 percent of the day doing the same work as the team, the description becomes evidence for the plaintiff. Misclassification exposure includes back overtime for two years, or three if willful, an equal amount in liquidated damages, and the employee’s attorney’s fees, often across everyone in the same role.

4. Employee or contractor: three tests, one relationship

Whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor is not decided by the contract’s label, and different agencies use different tests:

• Federal wage and hour law uses an “economic reality” test. The Department of Labor stopped enforcing its 2024 rule in 2025 and in February 2026 proposed a new rule centered on control and opportunity for profit or loss. Until a final rule issues, expect the analysis to keep shifting.
• The IRS looks at behavioral control, financial control, and the relationship of the parties for payroll taxes.
• The Texas Workforce Commission applies a 20-factor right-to-control test for unemployment tax. Texas presumes the worker is an employee, and the business has to prove otherwise. If the business has the right to control the work, that can be enough, whether or not it exercises it.

The trap is consistency. A company that writes a detailed job description for a “contractor,” sets their hours, trains them, and integrates them into a team has written evidence of control. Misclassification can bring unpaid unemployment and payroll taxes, overtime, benefits eligibility claims, and workers’ compensation coverage questions, all at once. See also the business law practice.

5. Equal pay, EEO reporting, and hidden screens

• Equal pay. The Equal Pay Act compares jobs by their content, the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, not their titles. Two different titles doing the same work are the same job for this purpose. Accurate descriptions are how a company knows which roles to compare.
• EEO-1 reporting. Employers that file EEO-1 reports must place every job in one of the EEOC’s job categories. That is a classification decision, and it should match the real work.
• Unnecessary requirements. A degree, test, or physical requirement that is not related to the job can screen out qualified candidates and, if it falls more heavily on a protected group, create disparate-impact liability, the lesson of Griggs v. Duke Power more than fifty years ago. It also shrinks the talent pool for no reason.
• Discipline and unemployment. When a performance or conduct issue reaches a Texas Workforce Commission hearing, the job description is often the first document that shows what the employee was expected to do. See what an uncontested unemployment claim costs.

What a good job description contains

Getting it right, and keeping it right

Most companies have never audited their job descriptions, and those that have rarely keep them current. Jobs drift. Laws change. A description that was accurate three years ago may be a liability today. That is why I offer more than a one-time cleanup: an audit and update of every description and classification, then ongoing updates on a schedule you choose. I explain how that works in job descriptions are living documents.