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Description
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was heralded as an opportunity for 37 million disabled Americans to be gainfully employed. The ADA requires employers to provide a reasonable accommodation without undue hardship that effectively accommodates an employee's physical or mental impairment (ADA, 1990, 42, U.S.C. 12112(5)(a)). These authors, in 1995, published experiences of employees with disabilities stemming from The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies (OEDS). The Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies is a unique database containing 21 years of 10,197 employment discrimination claims filed between 1985 and 2006 under federal and Ohio law (Slonaker and Wendt, 2006). The 1995 article, "Patterns of Employment Discrimination Toward Workers with Disabilities," identified three patterns of employers' reasons for taking harmful action against employees with disabilities. Those patterns were:
* Avoiding inconvenience--an employer's actions to avoid providing accommodation, e.g., ignoring an employee's disability, not recognizing a need for an accommodation, or failure to hire an applicant with an apparent disability.
* Not reasonably accommodating--providing an accommodation on face value alone, e.g., transferring a hearing-impaired secretary to a lower position instead of purchasing an amplified telephone to mitigate hearing loss, demoting a construction worker with a chronic back injury from supervisor to jackhammer operator, or reassigning most of the duties of an administrator on approved leaved for severe depression.
* Absenteeism as an excuse--the act of disciplining * or discharging a disabled employee for missing work related to their disability, e.g., an employee on the kidney transplant list needs to miss a portion of work two or three times a week for dialysis and is eventually fired; a cancer patient misses work every other Friday for chemotherapy and is suspended for excessive absenteeism; or, a learning disabled employee is reprimanded for habitual tardiness because the only available form of transportation, the city bus, arrives five to 10 minutes after the shift begins.
The 10% claim drop in 2006 suggests employer recognition of their obligations under ADA. However, providing reasonable accommodations to individuals is increasingly hindered by employers (1995, 21%; 2006, 30%). The pattern for using absenteeism as an excuse is the same from 1995 to 2006. Interestingly, employers are twice as likely to use "absenteeism" as their reason for taking harmful actions against claimants with disabilities than against claimants of other protected bases (race, sex, pregnancy, retaliation, age, national origin, and religion). Human resource literature frequently suggests that absenteeism is a major concern of U.S. employers. Why, then, is it twice as prevalent in disability claims? The authors suggest that employers may be harsher in administering absentee policies for employees with disabilities than they are in administering these policies for other employees.
Additionally, in 1995 the total of disability claims compared with the total number of claims in the database was 11.9%. As of 2006, this number had increased to 15.2%. Based on these findings, it was concluded that employers did not understand their obligation to provide a reasonable accommodation for a documented physical or mental impairment. Unfortunately, when the Employment Section of ADA marked its 15th anniversary on July 26, 2007 (the... |
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