Is the ADA Restoration Act of 2007 Good for Business?
October 3rd, 2007THE DEBATE ON DEFINING DISABILITY CONTINUES
The Americans with Disabilities Act changed the way the world, particularly Americans, viewed its disabled citizens. Since its passage in 1990, disabled workers were given the right to seek legal redress if an employer discriminated against someone because of that person’s physical or mental impairment. The intent behind the law was to take disability out of the workplace equation as long as the disabled employee could perform the essential functions of that job. However, the Supreme Court eventually slid the question of disability back into the equation with policy-shaping decisions, essentially spurring a creeping standard in the adjudication of disability-discrimination claims. In fact, proving the disability became the threshold consideration where discrimination itself was the issue. As a result, instead of focusing on the matter of whether an employer’s discriminatory or disparate treatment was based on an employee’s disability, the question of whether a disability even existed under the statute gave employer’s a chance at a legal backdoor through which to slip. That is until the ADA Restoration Act of 2007 sealed that door shut.
Under the Restoration Act, the original intent of the ADA is restored by redirecting focus back to the basis of a claim versus those smokescreen issues surrounding discrimination questions. Specifically, the Restoration Act provides a more cogent definition of disability and appreciates its nuances. It also leaves the courts to deal with the barenaked elements of a discrimination claim. For example, if a person wears glasses to correct poor eyesight, and an employer discriminates against that person based on his having poor eyesight, that worker is disabled in the context intended by the Restoration Act, thus legally protected. Prior to the Act, courts would consider corrective measures— such as eyeglasses, protheses, and medicine—as factors that disqualify ADA protection because they virtually erase disability. Laughable logic if it were not so dangerous. This focus on function, as opposed to bodily characteristics, created an ethical relativism in the business world where being disabled was as a matter of perspective. But now, employers will no longer be able to argue that a wronged employee does not have a substantially limiting condition that affects major life activity. Now, the same employee prevails if a disability, as defined under the new definition, was the basis of a discrimination claim.
Not everyone is happy with this change however. In a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of government affairs under the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argued that the Restoration Act applied too broadly and was “subject to greater confusion and litigation.” He supported his point by arguing that the statutory reinterpretation would make “virtually all of the entire working population in the United States…covered by the law.” He appears to contend that the only disabilities that should be covered under the statute are those that not only exist but render a person disabled in function as well. But what he fails to consider is how someone with a functional disability is likely to even compete in a business setting much less exist in one. The point is if Congress intended this tortured logic with the passage of the ADA, the Restoration Act would not have been necessary. And Mr. Josten’s attempt to galvanize the business community against the Restoration Act with slippery-slope conclusions to make it easier to attack is disheartening and hopefully ineffective. Maybe the disabled community should consider Mr. Josten’s shortsighted perspective the next time its members must decide whether to patronize a Chamber of Commerce entity.
In closing, the language of the ADA Restoration Act of 2007 holds employers accountable to a clearer standard and compels judges to weigh the merits of a disability-discrimination case by the legal template intended by Congress in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
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