Another Defeat for the ADA in Supreme Court
The following comes courtesy of Justice for All's Jonathan
Young:
"Another Defeat for the ADA in the Supreme Court"
Earlier today the Supreme Court again limited the reach of the ADA in the
Chevron v. Echazabal case. In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that a
business can deny a job to a person with a disability if that job would pose
health risks for the individual in question. In this case, Echazabal argued that
he had the right to choose for himself whether the job placed him at undue risk.
But the Supreme Court opted for the business's argument that it might subject
itself to a lawsuit if the employee's conditioned got worse while on the job.
The Bush administration supported the employer's position.
A statement by AAPD about the case follows, along with an AP story describing
the ruling.
Jonathan Young
JFA Editor, AAPD
AAPD Statement on Echazabal ADA Supreme Court case
"The United States Supreme Court today once again demonstrated its
fundamental hostility to disability rights in the workplace," said Andrew J.
Imparato, President and CEO of the American Association of People with
Disabilities (AAPD), the largest membership organization for all people with
disabilities in the U.S. "Today's decision invites paternalism and represents a
major step backward for the more than 35 million working age Americans with
disabilities."
"Justice O'Connor recently said in a speech that this term would be remembered
as the 'ADA term' for the Supreme Court. Today's decision, like the Toyota v.
Williams decision earlier this year, represents a unanimous opinion that
undercuts worker rights and facilitates discrimination by employers. Disability
advocates have learned from these two unanimous decisions that we have no
champions among the nine Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," concluded Imparato.
"With 70 percent of people with severe disabilities outside the workforce, the
last thing disabled Americans need is for employers to be given carte blanche to
discriminate against us 'for our own good.' Yet, today's decision sends a
message to employers that they have nothing to fear as long as they can concoct
a 'safety' rationale for not hiring a disabled worker," Imparato added.
Court Rules Against Debilitated Employee in Disabilities Case
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Disabled people cannot demand jobs that would threaten their
lives or health, the Supreme Court said Monday in a victory for employers who
argued they could be forced to hire people who would turn around and sue over
workplace injuries.
The unanimous decision makes it clear that employers can turn away people who
want a job even if they would be risking their lives to do it. The ruling also
makes it easier to fire disabled people who already have jobs that put their
health in jeopardy.
``If Typhoid Mary had come under the ADA, would a meat packer have been
defenseless if Mary had sued after being turned away?'' Justice David H. Souter
asked rhetorically in his opinion for the court.
The case is the latest in a line of rulings that limit worker rights under the
Americans With Disabilities Act, the landmark 1990 civil rights law for the
disabled. It is the second major ADA ruling this year that strengthened
employers' hands while making it more difficult or impossible for some workers
to claim the law gives them special protection.
Monday's case involved a former Chevron refinery worker with liver disease who
wanted his job back, whether chemical exposure would worsen his condition or
not. Mario Echazabal said he has no symptoms, can physically do the job and
should be able to decide for himself.
The justices reversed a lower court ruling in favor of Echazabal and sent the
case back for further review.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission struck the right balance between
protections for workers and employers when it wrote regulations that applied in
Echazabal's case, the court said.
The ADA requires employers to accommodate qualified disabled workers, but makes
an exception for those who may be a threat to the safety or health of others on
the job.
The EEOC, which can enforce the ADA in the workplace, has interpreted the
exception as also applying to workers who may only be a risk to themselves.
Monday's ruling frees employers who were ``between a rock and a hard place,''
said Stephen Bokat, senior vice president and general counsel of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce.
Employers worried they would be sued for rejecting disabled workers, and also
open to lawsuits or prosecution under federal workplace safety laws. Business
groups lined up behind Chevron in the case, as did the Bush administration.
``This is twice this year by 9-0 decisions that the court has made clear that
they think the ADA was being read by the lower courts too broadly,'' Bokat said.
``It's 9-0. No one can say these are the conservative bloc or the right wing of
the court or whatever rejecting employee rights. It's all the members of the
court, left, right and central.''
In January, the court ruled against an assembly line worker with carpal tunnel
syndrome. That case made it harder for workers to demand special treatment when
they suffer partial disabilities that may impair them on the job but do not
substantially affect day-to-day life.
In April, the court ruled 5-4 against an airline worker who wanted to go around
the company seniority policy to claim a job that did not aggravate his back
injury.
The latest ruling potentially applies to any employer, although lawyers said it
will have the greatest effect in industrial settings such as the El Segundo,
Calif., chemical plant where Echazabal worked for more than 20 years.
``There is a long history in this country of (employers) limiting the
opportunities of people with disabilities out of a misplaced concern for the
safety of those people,'' a response that Congress meant to forbid when it
passed the ADA, said Samuel Bagenstos, Echazabal's lawyer at the high court.
The court did not give employers carte blanche to claim that a disabled employee
is unable to do a job for health reasons. Each case must be evaluated on its
own, using the latest medical guidelines, Souter wrote.
The ruling is in line with all six previous Supreme Court rulings testing the
limits of the ADA on the job. In each, the employer won and the worker lost.
``The United States Supreme Court today once again demonstrated its
fundamental hostility to disability rights in the workplace,'' said Andrew J.
Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities.
George Crisci, a Cleveland labor and employment lawyer, predicts still more
Supreme Court cases to refine what accommodations employers must make.
``There's more work to be done,'' Crisci said.
The case is Chevron v. Echazabal, 01-1406.
Source:
NY Times
Overview of Recent ADA Supreme Court Decisions
Here's an excellent article from the San Francisco Chronicle
reviewing this year's four ADA decisions by the Supreme Court:
Disability law suffers in high court; 4 recent rulings undercut ADA, say
groups that work with disabled
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, June 23, 2002
For millions of disabled Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court has become chilly --
some would say hostile -- terrain.
Four rulings in disability cases during the 2001-02 term, all of which went
against the disabled, continued a trend that started in 1999, when the court
took its first whack at the broadly worded Americans With Disabilities Act.
The 1990 law prohibited discrimination against the disabled in public and
private employment, required employers to provide accommodations that allow them
to keep working, and guaranteed them equal access to governmentprograms and
services such as parks and public buildings.
Disability rights groups say the court has limited the ADA's scope so much in
the past few years that they now rely almost entirely on California law, which
is broader, to protect the disabled in the workplace. That option is not
available in most states, which have less protective laws, advocates say.
Ruling mostly in employment cases, the Supreme Court has crafted a narrow
definition of the disabled - most recently when it said in January that an
assembly-line worker sidelined by carpal tunnel syndrome was not disabled as
long as she could engage in everyday activities, such as doing household chores
and brushing her teeth.
In that ruling, the justices also hinted strongly that they did not consider
working at a job to be a "major life activity" -- a prerequisite for ADA
coverage -- and were prepared to rule in the future that a person should not be
considered disabled merely because he or she could no longer work.
"It's a shorthand way of saying they don't expect most disabled people to work,"
said Andrew Imperato, president of the 28,000-member American Association of
People with Disabilities. "That turns the ADA on its head."
The court has also prohibited federal damage suits by disabled state government
employees, and this month unanimously barred punitive damages against local
governments for willful ADA violations.
And in another ruling this month that advocates for the disabled called perhaps
the most painful of all, the court said employers, not employees, had the power
to decide when a job was too dangerous for the disabled.
In that case, the court said an oil refinery could deny a job to a worker with a
liver disease that might make him vulnerable to toxic infections, provided the
refinery based its decision on objective medical evidence. The worker denied he
was at risk and said the decision should be his to make.
That ruling touched "the core of (disabled) people's experiences," said Arlene
Mayerson, directing attorney at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
in Berkeley. "People are always trying to protect them. . . .It's one of the
most insidious ways people with disabilities have been excluded."
The case is only the latest illustration that "so many things we thought we had
accomplished in the ADA are not there," said Mayerson, who took part in
negotiating and drafting the 1990 law.
But Palo Alto lawyer Fred Alvarez, who represents employers and is a former
high-ranking federal official, said the Supreme Court justices are simply
bringing some coherence to the law.
"They're looking at a statute that can be read to cover almost everyone in the
country," said Alvarez, who served on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission and was an assistant labor secretary overseeing disability programs,
both under President Ronald Reagan. "They're saying Congress could not have
intended that."
Another management-side lawyer, Douglas Dexter of San Francisco, said the court
is keeping the definition of disability "quite narrow, the narrowest you could
interpret it within the language of the statute."
He said the reason is that the court is trying to limit the impact of the
"fairly dramatic requirement that's being imposed on employers" to accommodate
the disabled under the ADA.
The assessments by Alvarez and Dexter are consistent with recent statements by
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
Speaking this March to a group of business lawyers, O'Connor said the ADA
illustrated what happens when a bill's sponsors "are so eager to get something
passed that what passes hasn't been as carefully written as a group of law
professors might put together," according to an account in the Washington Post.
"That act is one of those that did leave uncertainties as to what Congress had
in mind," she said.
Two months earlier, in the ruling on carpal tunnel syndrome, O'Connor wrote that
the ADA's definition of disability "must be interpreted strictly to create a
demanding standard." Otherwise, she said, the numberof disabled Americans would
be much higher than the 43 million estimated by Congress when it passed the law.
O'Connor was also the principal author of the court's 1999 rulings that first
limited the disability definition by excluding people whose conditions -- high
blood pressure or nearsightedness, for example -- could be remedied. The
rulings, like the carpal tunnel case, meant that employers could deny jobs to
people because of their conditions and have no duty to accommodate them.
"The way they're going, there are not going to be 43 million Americans
protected, only those with the most traditional disabilities, like wheelchair
users, blind people and deaf people," said Larry Paradis, legaldirector of
Disability Rights Advocates in Oakland.
Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown University law professor who was one of the chief
drafters of the ADA, said its language was modeled after a 17-year-old
disability law that had been interpreted to cover not only traditional
categories but also conditions like epilepsy and bad backs, largely excluded by
rulings of the last few years. "It never occurred to us that those words would
be applied with such constricted interpretations," she said. "Congress intended
to cover people with a range of health conditions without much lawyer time spent
on how disabling the impairment was."
On the employers' side, attorney Alvarez said the court was upholding
congressional intent. He noted that the ADA, unlike other civil rights laws,
requires employers to work with employees on adjustments that might keep them on
the job, like adaptive equipment and new assignments.
The court is "just trying to make sure it isn't used in so many circumstances
that it becomes meaningless," he said. "Truly disabled people need that process.
You don't want it diluted."
Lawyers on both sides say the Supreme Court rulings underscore the importance of
California's disability rights law, which covers a wider range of conditions
than the court-interpreted ADA and contains none of the court's restrictions on
damage suits.
The nation's high court has not yet accepted any ADA cases for review in the
term that starts in October, though lawyers for Disability Rights Advocates
spoke nervously about a Cleveland case that could give the justices a chance to
further restrict ADA suits against states.
Looking ahead more hopefully, the plaintiffs' lawyers recalled 1987 and 1991,
when Congress rewrote laws on sex and race discrimination to undo restrictive
Supreme Court rulings.
Said Paradis of Disability Rights Advocates: "It may be time for an ADA
Restoration Act."
Source:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/06/23/MN170807.DTL
Copyright 2002 SF Chronicle
This "Mental Health E-News" posting is a service of the New
York Ass'n of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services, a statewide coalition of
people who use and/or provide community mental health services dedicated to
improving services and social conditions for people with psychiatric
disabilities by promoting their recovery, rehabilitation and rights.
To join our list, e-mail us your request and, where
appropriate, the name of your organization to
NYAPRS@aol.com.
