I’ve talked about wellness programs from time to time here on the blog. Robin Shea, on her great blog, first brought this up back in August. But since then, there are some new developments from the EEOC that employers should keep an eye out on.
Today, my colleague Marc Herman joins us for the first
Earlier this week, I beat Ohio lawyer Jon Hyman to the punch on a post about Leap Day. Yesterday, he “returned” the favor, with a notable post on the release of the EEOC’s new guide: Veterans & the ADA: A Guide for Employers.
Jon looks
At the core of every employment relationship is the expectation that the employee will perform the job satisfactorily.
But what happens to those performance expectations when an employee has a disability?
As the federal government has acknowledged, The Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits “employment discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities, generally do[es] not
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Today, my colleague Jonathan Orleans makes a return engagement to the blog, updating us on a decision released by the District Court of Connecticut yesterday that has relevance to various ADA cases in the state. The Defendant was successfully represented by another colleague of mine here at the firm, Marcy Stovall.
A decision issued yesterday by a federal district court in Connecticut provides some useful guidance on the distinction, for purposes of the Americans With Disabilities Act, between impairments that merely affect major life activities and those that substantially limit such activities.
The decision by Judge Janet Arterton also clarifies that in determining whether the plaintiff is substantially limited in important life activities, the plaintiff is compared to “most people,” not to any subgroup of the general population.
In Rumbin v. Association of American Medical Colleges (download here), the plaintiff sought various accommodations, including extra time, to take the Medical College Admission Test (the “MCAT”), claiming to be disabled because he was severely limited in the major life activity of seeing.
He submitted to the Association, which administers the MCAT, reports from his treating ophthalmologist and a behavioral optometrist who said that he had various vision-related impairments, including glaucoma, ocular misalignment, convergence insufficiency, binocular dysfunction, and oculomotor dysfunction.
The Association nonetheless denied his request for accommodation after having his application reviewed by its own expert, the Executive Director of the National Board of Examiners in Optometry, who found the reports of plaintiff’s doctors unconvincing on a variety of grounds.
(Interestingly, the Association presented evidence at trial that the MCAT is intentionally designed to be arduous and time-pressured, and that it is reluctant to grant requests for extra time because studies show that scores on tests where extra time is given are not equivalent to scores on tests using the standard timing.)
The Defendant was also represented by Robert Burgoyne of Fulbright & Jaworski in Washington, DC.Continue Reading Impairments That Merely Affect Major Life Activities Not Covered by ADA, Says Federal Court
Nearly eight months ago, I asked the question: Will the Americans with Disabilities Act Be Amended?
At that point, I indicated t
hat an ADA Restoration Act Bill of 2007 was not yet a "hot topic" but as election season heated up, we could see some action on some proposed amendments. There have been some followup
In a case that automatically vaults to the top of important disability discrimination cases in Connecticut, the Connecticut Supreme Court today held, in an issue of first impression, that employers have a duty to provide a reasonable accommodation to disabled workers under state law, even though the law does not explicitly say so.
While
For over 15 years, the Americans with Disabilities Act has been the subject of lots of hand-wringing inside human resources departments across the country. Phrases such as "reasonable accommodation" and "undue hardship" took on new meanings. And of course, the Act spawned lots of litigation to determine the parameters of the act.
Now, a Senate