Senate Passes Bill to Expand Workplace Protections for Disabled
The Senate passed a bill yesterday to expand workplace protections for people with disabilities.
The legislation is similar to a bill passed in June by the House, Reuters reports. Minor differences between the two bills are expected to be ironed out quickly so a final version can be sent to President Bush.
The bill, S. 3406, provides that a person may be disabled even though measures such as medication, prosthetics and assistive technology are used to mitigate the disability, report Reuters and Washington Labor & Employment Wire, a blog sponsored by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
The legislation was intended to override Sutton v. United Airlines, a U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that mitigating measures should be considered when determining whether a disability exists, according to an analysis of the bill by the Heritage Foundation.
However, the bill provides that ordinary eyeglasses and contact lenses may be considered in determining disability, recognizing that mild visual impairments are not disabilities, the Heritage Foundation analysis says.
Both the House and Senate bills again define a disability as a physical or mental impairment that “substantially limits” one or more major life activities, the Reuters story says. They increase the number of activities covered, add a category of bodily functions and continue to allow lawsuits for employer violations.
The bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said the Supreme Court had through a series of rulings interpreting the ADA cut down on protection for the disabled.
“The erosions of rights created by these court cases have created a bizarre Catch 22 where people with serious conditions like epilepsy or diabetes could be forced to choose between treating their conditions and forfeiting their protections under the ADA, or not treating their conditions and being protected,” Harkin said.
The Heritage Foundation contends the bill will increase the regulatory burden on employers. It prefers the Senate measure to the House bill, which would define “substantially limits” to mean “materially restricts.” The foundation contends that definition is unclear and could sweep minor impairments into the law’s protections.
Andrew Imparato, head of the American Association of People with Disabilities, applauded the Senate’s passage of the bill. “This is the most important piece of disability legislation since the enactment of the ADA in 1990,” he told Reuters.
