Legal —13

VI. Discrimination Laws

Americans with Disabilities Act
There have been few positive legal developments under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) since the 35th Grand Lodge Convention. The federal courts have continued to narrow the definition of what constitutes a disability within the meaning of the ADA, with the Supreme Court leading the way. In the wake of its 1999 Sutton trilogy, which drastically restricted the scope of conditions that might qualify as ADA disabilities, in 2002, the Supreme Court held in Toyota v.Williams that an employee with severe carpal tunnel system was not disabled within the meaning of the ADA even though she was substantially limited in the ability to perform the manual tasks involved in her assembly line job. According to the Supreme Court, it was not enough that the employee could not perform her particular job or even similar types of jobs. She would have to show that she was substantially limited in performing a broad range of jobs as well as a range of other life activities in order to be considered disabled within the meaning of the ADA.

The Supreme Court further diminished the rights of disabled employees in another 2002 decision, Chevron v. Echazabal. That case examined the scope of the business necessity defense available to employers under the ADA where the employment of a disabled individual would pose a direct threat to the health or safety of other individuals in the workplace. Contrary to the explicit language of the ADA itself, the Supreme Court ruled that an employer could refuse to hire a disabled individual if that employment might include a direct threat to the employee himself, not just a direct threat to others. The case involved an individual with liver disease who had worked for several years for subcontractors in a Chevron refinery, but whom Chevron refused to hire because exposure to toxins in that workplace might aggravate his liver disease.

There was one positive development for unions and union members in the Supreme Court’s ADA decisions. The Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. Airways v. Barnett protected collectively-bargained seniority rights in holding that an employer need not make accommodations for disabled employees which violate legitimate seniority systems. Even this decision, however, had a major drawback in that it covered non-contractual unilateral employer seniority systems without the vital enforcement mechanisms of a union contract’s grievance and arbitration procedures.

The decimation of the ADA by the federal courts leaves us no choice; the rights of IAM members who suffer injury, illness or disability depend on our ability to negotiate and enforce contractual protections and accommodations. If the courts through the ADA will not force employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ physical and mental limitations in the workplace, we must do so.