Megaconference Special #5 of 6: ADA-AA Whyfor in Employment

Saturday ended up being "ADA Day" for me at the Megaconference, both sessions I attended being on the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). The first was called "The ADA Amendment Acts of 2008" and focused on the definition of "disability" according to the ADA and employment (Section I). The key item stressed in both ADA presentations is that the ADA is civil rights legislation.

As someone who followed the ADA-AA as it was being worked on last year, I was already familiar with the basics--that the power of the ADA had been weakened and that the ADA-AA was to restore the original intent of congress. What I was less familiar with were the concrete examples behind why this was so: over and over, people were being deemed "too disabled" to work at their jobs, but "not disabled enough" to be protected under the ADA. So people were being fired, demoted, discriminated against, and then dismissed. Imagine a woman who is fired for being female and then told she's not "womanly enough" for the ERA to apply to her.

Now the really fascinating bit to me was the speaker's rundown of why this happened (I'm always so interested in the whys!). Especially as this "why" has a lot to do with perspectives.

The ADA is, again, civil rights legislation. It is not a government service, it is not something one "applies for." However (at least according to the speaker), when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission first got a hold of it to create regulations, they came immediately from the perspective of social security and workman's compensation--government programs that require a person "prove" some "level" of disability--not from the perspective of civil rights.

This lead to bickering over whether an individual was "qualified" rather than seeing the person as a member in a protected group, even to the point of going to people's houses to make sure they were "disabled enough" at home to qualify as protected in the workplace under the ADA. Imagine a religious discrimination case involving someone going to your home to make sure you had the "right amount" of religious items in your house and following you to make sure you regularly attend religious services! This is especially problematic as the ADA doesn't just protect people who are disabled, but people who are considered to be disabled (but aren't actually) or who are associated with someone else who is disabled!

The ADA-AA hopefully has changed this perspective around to make sure that the focus of anti-discrimination cases is on the discrimination rather than the "level of disability" of the person. This is one of many examples of how perspectives and attitudes toward people on the spectrum, or people with disabilities, need to change and modernize to see us not as medical problems but as human beings with human rights.

It will be interesting to watch how regulations and application of the legislation unfold as we move into the future.

For more information on the ADA-AA, see the U.S. Department of Labor's ADA FAQs. Also, see DBTAC Northwest's ADA-AA resources.

[news potpourri tomorrow--still playing catch-up]