High court limits disability act’s reach

The Washington Post And Associated Press

WASHINGTON — In a victory for employers, the U.S. Supreme Court made it more difficult for workers to demand special treatment when they suffer partial physical disabilities such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

The court’s unanimous decision in the case of a former assembly line worker narrowed the scope of the Americans With Disabilities Act with the ruling that an impairment must have a substantial effect on a person’s daily life to qualify as a disability under the law.

Conditions that only prevent a worker from performing a specific job-related task are not legal disabilities, the court said. "Merely having an impairment does not make one disabled for purposes of the ADA," the court declared. "Claimants also need to demonstrate that the impairment limits a major life activity."

The unanimous ruling written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor could affect millions of workers who suffer from repetitive strain injuries or other conditions that affect their jobs. Both sides — labor and management — in the long-running dispute over the scope of the ADA agreed that Tuesday’s ruling will make it more difficult for workers to prove that they are disabled and therefore entitled under the law to an accommodation by their employers.

The ruling does not mean that anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome or similar partial disabilities is automatically excluded from protection by the ADA, but it will make such claims harder to prove, lawyers said.

Kathleen Blank with the National Council on Disability said the decision "is going to affect a lot of people. This decision is going to give employers a lot of confidence that they can challenge workers on whether they are disabled. It’s clearly a decision in favor of employers, giving them more latitude to refuse to make accommodations."

But Stephen Bokat, general counsel of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, hailed the ruling as "the definitive opinion on what constitutes a disability under the ADA." He said it should reduce the number of "marginal cases" brought against businesses under the 1990 legislation, but denied that it would encourage employers to resist making accommodations for employees who have impairments that affect their work.