Q.: What legal rights do employees with disabilities have at work?
A.: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects employees with disabilities from discrimination at work. The ADA prohibits employers from treating qualified employees with disabilities differently than other employees. The ADA also requires employers to make “reasonable accommodations” for qualified employees with disabilities, so they are not prevented from doing their jobs because of relatively minor problems caused by their disabilities. For the purposes of the ADA, job applicants are considered to be employees and share the same rights and responsibilities.

Q.: What responsibilities do employees with disabilities have at work under the ADA?
A.:  An employer cannot respond appropriately to a disabled employee’s situation if it does not know about the disability. Therefore, employees must make their employers aware of disabilities that hinder their job performance in order to receive the protections of the ADA. Employees also should have realistic expectations about their employer's ability to accommodate a disability. For example, employers are not required to create a new position if a disabled employee cannot perform the essential functions of existing positions.

Q.:  What qualifies as a disability under the ADA?
A.:  A disability is any physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity, such as caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, and working. Common examples include legal blindness, deafness, insulin-dependent diabetes, bipolar disorder, and AIDS. Measures that lessen the severity of a disability, such as prosthetics, medication, and other treatment, must be considered when determining if impairment substantially limits a major life activity.

Q.:  How do employers and employees determine if a reasonable accommodation is possible?
A.:  Employers and employees should work together to determine if a reasonable accommodation exists. Generally speaking, an accommodation is any change in the work environment or the way things are customarily done that enables a qualified employee with a disability to enjoy equal employment opportunity. An accommodation is not reasonable if it causes an undue hardship for the employer.

Employers and employees must cooperate with each other to identify possible accommodations and discuss their effectiveness. However, the employer is ultimately responsible for offering a reasonable accommodation if one is possible. In return, the employee is required to accept any solution that the employer chooses, so long as it effectively accommodates the employee's disability.

Q.:  What are some examples of reasonable accommodations?
A.:  Because every workplace and every disabled employee is different, there are an infinite number of reasonable accommodations that can be made. Most of these accommodations can be classified into three main groups. First, an employer may provide a physical device or alter a work pattern to accommodate a disability. Examples include stools for disabled employees who have difficulty standing, large-screen computer monitors for disabled employees with severe vision problems, etc. Second, an employer may eliminate a non-essential part of the job to accommodate a disabled employee. For example, if an employee's disability prevents him or her from meeting a demand of the job such as occasionally lifting heavy loads, the employer may assign another employee to do it. Third, an employer may grant a disabled employee an unpaid leave of absence to accommodate a temporary inability to work. For example, an employee with a disabling sickness may be given a leave of absence to undergo treatment that requires temporary hospitalization.

Q.:  What are some examples of accommodations that cause “undue hardship” for an employer?
A.:  The law says that certain accommodations always cause “undue hardship” for employers. It is considered unreasonable, for example, to require an employer to eliminate an essential function or fundamental duty of the position, or to lower production standards that are applied uniformly to employees with and without disabilities. Therefore, employers are not required to make these kinds of accommodations. An employer also does not have to provide personal use items needed in accomplishing daily activities both on and off the job, such as a prosthetic limb, a wheelchair, eyeglasses, hearing aids, or similar devices, if these items are also needed off the job.

8/19/2007

Law You Can Use is a weekly consumer legal information column provided by the Ohio State Bar Association. This article was prepared by Timothy G. Pepper, an attorney with the Dayton office of Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP.