Public Safety Comes First

The Americans With Disabilities Act has made streets, offices, mass transportation and most public and private facilities accessible to countless numbers of people in wheelchairs. It has helped put Braille buttons on elevators in public buildings and enabled the hearing-impaired to use public telephones and understand television shows. The ADA has opened workplace doors as well and, in the process, has helped to remove a social stigma. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of cases slated for argument in the next two weeks, is invited to broaden the definition of “disabilities” to include common, treatable impairments suffered by tens of millions, among them nearsightedness and high blood pressure. The court should decline the invitation.

The justices’ decision could shape the job prospects of a huge number of individuals, and in making it the court must balance the competing interests of workers, employers and the public at large. This is a tough set of cases, even by Supreme Court standards.

One case under review involves a state’s obligation to house and treat the mentally ill. In the other three, workers with serious but treatable health impairments were fired or denied jobs because of their conditions. A Kansas truck driver with an excellent 22-year record was fired when his employer, United Parcel Service, found he had unusually high blood pressure, which he generally kept in check with medication. The federal appeals court in Denver, noting that the driver “can function normally” when medicated, ruled that he cannot be considered disabled under the ADA. On the same ground, the court threw out a discrimination case brought by twin sisters who were denied jobs as pilots with United Air Lines because they had to wear glasses to pass the company’s vision test. But in the third case, the federal appeals court in San Francisco went the other way, concluding that a truck driver who sees out of only one eye but who has learned to compensate for the impairment is disabled and therefore protected.

The statutory language of the ADA is vague, but the years of debate in Congress that led to its enactment show that the law was clearly intended to help the disabled who needed special accommodation to work or function in public. Although it forced employers to build access ramps and widen doors, it did not require them to tailor the conditions of employment to the handicapped. In fact, in deciding which people to hire, employers were left free to determine “which functions of a job were essential” and which were not. Doing otherwise might pose a threat to public safety in some instances.

Whether a man with high blood pressure can drive a truck and whether a nearsighted woman can fly a jetliner are questions best left up to the employer, who is ultimately responsible for the employees’ actions. We certainly question UPS’ decision to fire a driver after two decades instead of placing him elsewhere in the company. But we cannot oppose an employer’s policy--applied uniformly across the board--that disqualifies any driver with blood pressure above some threshold level. To forbid such policies would go beyond the intent of the law.

Another compelling argument against an overly broad interpretation by the justices in these cases is that it could invite abuse and undermine public support of the ADA, a law that a vast majority of Americans today find fair.

A part of the nation’s civil rights legislation, the ADA was conceived as a weapon against prejudice and discrimination. It was not designed to create remedies for aggrieved employees or allow every form of common impairment to be treated as a protected disability. Going beyond the legislation’s goal would serve nobody.