Workplace Health Risks at Heart of Chevron Case

The Supreme Court will take up the case on Wednesday of an El Segundo oil refinery worker with a liver ailment to consider whether a company or an employee gets to decide whether a workplace represents a danger to a worker’s health.

The case has drawn intense interest from gay rights and women’s rights activists as well as from corporate lawyers.

The workers’ advocates say that individuals with HIV, heart ailments or other medical conditions should not be excluded from jobs simply because the employer believes that the workplace could expose them to danger.

Corporate lawyers say they fear that companies will be sued--or even prosecuted criminally--if they put a sick worker into what they consider to be an unsafe environment.

“There is a lot of interest in this case among employers because this happens a lot,” said Robin C. Conrad, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber and other business groups had urged the high court to reconsider a pro-worker decision written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt in Los Angeles for the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

It came in the case of Mario Echazabal, 56, a maintenance worker at the Chevron oil refinery near Los Angeles International Airport.

Since 1972, Echazabal had worked for a private contractor at the refinery. In 1995, he sought a full-time job with Chevron and was hired, pending a physical exam.

The company’s doctor found that Echazabal had hepatitis C, a chronic, noninfectious liver ailment. Chevron revoked the job offer and barred Echazabal from the plant, claiming that exposure to chemicals and solvents there could endanger his health.

Echazabal sued the company under the Americans with Disabilities Act, contending that the company unfairly discriminated against him because of his liver disease.

“No one questioned he was qualified for the job. He had done the work for years,” said Echazabal’s lawyer, Larry Minsky of Cerritos. “And he’s fine and has no symptoms. But he was out of a job.”

Minsky found two medical experts who said Echazabal’s health would not be endangered by the refinery job. Dr. Gary Gitnick, an expert on liver diseases at the UCLA School of Medicine, said Echazabal’s liver was functioning and that he had “no greater risk of injuring himself” at the refinery than did other workers.

Nonetheless, a federal judge sided with Chevron and threw out Echazabal’s claim before a trial.

When Echazabal appealed, the 9th Circuit Court sided with him on a 2-1 vote. In his decision, Reinhardt noted that the ADA says employers may not discriminate against a “qualified individual with a disability” except when the prospective worker would pose a “direct threat to others.”

Echazabal’s liver ailment did not pose a threat to others; the only danger was to himself, Reinhardt said. Moreover, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and other sponsors of the ADA made it clear that the legislation prohibited employers from making hiring or firing decisions based on “paternalistic concerns” about a worker’s heath, Reinhardt noted.

The Supreme Court said much the same in 1991 when it ruled that the managers of a plant that made car batteries could not exclude female workers on the grounds that a potential fetus could be exposed to danger there.

In their appeal, lawyers for Chevron said “the absurd result in this case will cost workers’ lives and force unwilling employers to be complicit in their injuries.” They relied in part on a strong dissent by Judge Stephen Trott, who called Reinhardt’s conclusion “bizarre.” Trott said the ruling apparently means that a saw plant worker with “narcolepsy or epilepsy must be allowed to operate a power saw, and a person allergic to bees is entitled to be hired as a beekeeper.”

The justices will hear arguments in the case of Chevron vs. Echazabal, 00-1406, Wednesday morning. In recent rulings, the court has been decidedly skeptical of employees’ claims based on the ADA.

In their briefs, the two sides differ on what liability an employer might face.

Chevron’s lawyers say that under California law, the company’s managers could be sued, and perhaps even jailed, if they knowingly expose a sick worker to potentially dangerous chemicals.

But Echazabal’s lawyers say that employers who take “all reasonable steps” to warn a worker of a danger cannot be held at fault if a determined employee later gets sick or dies from the exposure.

Business leaders do not take comfort from that concession.

“‘This puts employers in a terrible dilemma. No matter what they say, employers are going to look guilty if they put someone in a job who later suffers severe injury,” said Fred W. Alvarez, a Palo Alto attorney who filed a brief on behalf of the Employers Group, a coalition of California companies.

But Matthew A. Coles, who heads the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, said the final decision should be left to the individual. “Every job involves some risks, and the question is: Do we let people make those risk assessments for themselves, or do we let employers decide?”

Since losing his job at the refinery, Echazabal had been working part time as a school bus driver, his lawyer said. On Wednesday, however, he plans to be at the Supreme Court to hear the argument in his case.

Meanwhile, the high court refused Monday to hear a claim by Indiana state officials who sought to erect a 7-foot monument with the Ten Commandments on state grounds. Judges had barred the display as an unconstitutional “establishment of religion” (O’Bannon vs. Indiana Civil Liberties Union, 01-966).