On the one hand, this policy of "pretend the order has shipped as an excuse for refusing cancellation" versus an unwillingness to directly lie to the customer (

On the one hand, this policy of "pretend the order has shipped as an excuse for refusing cancellation" versus an unwillingness to directly lie to the customer (saying "it's already shipped" versus, for example, "we're already working on it" or some other hedged statement that is not directly untrue) is an interesting way for this kind of conflict to come up. But on the other hand (assuming that the employer is unwilling to change their policy), this is a pretty simple case from a manager/employee relation perspective. The employee has a particular set of work actions that they are unable to perform which they are expressing as deriving from a protected class membership. The employer has three basic options: 1) The employer can contest that this inability is truly related to a protected class and compel the employee to do the assigned work on pain of termination (which in this instance would lead to termination, most likely) 2) The employer can accept that this inability does derive from the protected class and determine that there is a reasonable accommodation available, such as exempting the employee from responding specifically to these tickets in some way. Maybe assign them a larger-than-equal-share of tickets to work on but then have a simple procedure to give away all order-cancellation-request tickets to others to work on. 3) The employer can assert that responding to these tickets is an unavoidable and critical component of the job and therefore assign the employee to a different role (or tailor a role specifically for them) such that they are not required to do this work.