Amendments to Americans with Disabilities Act

The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (the “Amendments”) passed the U.S. House of Representatives on June 25, 2008. The Senate is expected to pass a similar bipartisan measure in the near future. If these Amendments become law, they will expand employers’ obligations to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with impairments and make it easier for individuals to prove discrimination under the ADA.

The Amendments would revise the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), which prohibits employers with 15 or more employees from discriminating "against a qualified individual with a disability because of the disability of such individual in regard to job application procedures, the hiring, advancement, or discharge of employees, employee compensation, job training, and other terms, conditions, and privileges of employment." Discrimination, under the ADA, includes "not making reasonable accommodations to the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability who is an applicant or employee, unless such covered entity can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation of the business of such covered entity."

The Amendments would expand the ADA’s protection of persons with disabilities and overturn recent Supreme Court decisions that created a demanding standard for qualifying as disabled under ADA. Specifically, the ADA Amendments would replace the judicially created requirement that an impairment prevent or severely restrict an individual from doing activities that are of central importance to most people’s daily lives with the requirement that an impairment “materially restrict” a major life activity (like seeing, hearing, eating, walking, reading or thinking) to qualify as disabled under the ADA.

The Amendments would also prohibit the consideration of the effects of “mitigating measures” such as prescription drugs, hearing aids and artificial limbs in the determination of whether an individual qualifies as disabled under the ADA. The Amendments would also mandate that “an impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active” and provide protection for people who experience discrimination based on a perception of impairment regardless of whether a disability actually exists.

Stay tuned, we will keep you posted on further developments.