Supreme Court To Rule on ADA Suits
Beyond the confines of trucking, the opinion, which may be issued as early as this week, will define more specifically who is and who is not entitled to sue their employer under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
One truck driver, a heavy truck mechanic and twin sisters who applied to be pilots with United Airlines have ended up in court, their lawyers said in oral arguments April 27 and 28, because of discrimination, the very thing the ADA was passed to prohibit.
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li>The mechanic suffers from severe hypertension.
li>The twin sisters need corrective lenses to see normally.
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The first two claim they were unfairly fired because of their disabilities; the twins say they were denied employment for the same reason.
For trucking, a second dilemma lies in the tension between two government mandates: ADA and Department of Transportation safety regulations.
In one of the cases before the justices, truck driver Hallie Kirkingburg, who is nearly blind in one eye, sued Albertson's Inc., a grocery store chain that fired him because he did not meet DOT's vision standard -- even though the Federal Highway Administration had granted him a vision waiver.
When the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in Kirkingburg's favor, Albertson's appealed to the Supreme Court.
"Certainly, employers are generally allowed to set their own reasonable, nondiscriminatory standards for worker qualifications, even if they exceed those standard in the trade, or those minimally required by law," said R. George Wright, of the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala.
"But it might be argued that the precise point of the FHWA vision waiver program is to bring the DOT vision standards into compliance with the ADA, on the theory that some drivers who can't meet the DOT vision standards can nevertheless be shown to be disabled yet entirely safe drivers," he said.
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