Tomorrow, I’ll be part of a webinar produced by the American Bar Association on reasonable accommodations under the ADA. You can still sign up here.
The topic page for the webinar gives a fairly concise summary:
A reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is any modification or adjustment to a job or
Continuing his posts on wellness programs, my colleague Marc Herman fills us in on what’s the latest.
I return today with the second part of a two-part post on wellness programs.
Reference to my prior post is not to be braggadocious, but to remind you that both posts ought be read in tandem.
So, back in January, I penned a post titled “Can You Fire an Employee Who Has Exhausted FMLA Leave?”
As if to respond, the EEOC yesterday released guidance that basically answers: Not necessarily, because it might violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
And that is the crux of the issue for employers.
Before I go
Here’s a hypothetical: A observant Jewish worker who is a recent leg amputee comes to you seeking an “accommodation”. She works on the candy wrapping line that requires constant supervision and is staffed by only one or two people typically. She seeks to leave her shift 4 hours early on Fridays to observe the Jewish
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
A bill which would allow individuals with certain medical conditions access to private employee restrooms in retail establishments was reported out of the Legislative Commissioner’s Office and approved by various committees on Tuesday.
House Bill 6328 (download here) states that "Any retail establishment that has a restroom for employee use, which typically does not
As background, everyone knows that Connecticut has a minimum wage law for employment (now at $8.00 per hour, going up to $8.25 for 2010). While there are some limited exceptions to that rule (most notably for servers and bartenders who get a tip and some apprentices), it is now viewed as a societal
Yesterday, I started recapping some stories from 2008 that never quite made it into full-fledged blog posts, but were worth a look at.
Before we move on to new subjects for the new year, I’ll recap a few more stories that are worth taking a look at that you might have missed.
The EEOC today released a "comprehensive question-and-answer guide" (but not regulations) addressing how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) should be applied to a wide variety of performance and conduct issues. You can download the FAQs at their website here.
In a press release accompanying the document, the EEOC noted that it released the guide in response