The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) :: essays papers

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Preemployment screening can help management avoid hiring problem employees. However, employers must carefully walk through the screening process, or they may find themselves in violation of the discrimination laws set by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Security Management, with the assistance of legal experts, has reviewed the docket of 131 recent ADA cases at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to see whether any instructive trends are evident. The docket consists of ADA cases currently under litigation or recently decided. Most of the cases reviewed concerned preemployment issues, rather than disagreements that arose during employment. The ADA divides employment into three time periods: before the job offer, after the job offer, and employment. During the first stage, an employer is not allowed to ask questions that are likely to cause the applicant to reveal a disability. At this stage, the employer cannot require medical tests and can only ask whether an applicant can perform essential job-related functions, with or without reasonable accommodation. After an offer has been made but before the applicant has started working, employers have the freedom to ask any type of medical question or require any medical test, but employers are limited in what they can do with this information. At this stage, the job offer is considered conditional; however, a conditional offer can be withdrawn only under two conditions: if the test reveals that the applicant cannot perform the essential functions of the job (with or without reasonable accommodation) or if placing the candidate in the job-given the applicant's medical condition-would pose a direct threat to the health or safety of the applicant or other employees. As an example of the second situation, an employee who suffers intermittent, unpredictable blackouts could not drive a forklift without posing a direct safety threat in the workplace. For current employees, employers can only require medical tests or ask medical questions when they are job related and necessary for business reasons. The only exception is drug testing. The ADA does not protect current users of illegal drugs, nor does it consider drug testing a medical exam. Thus, employers have the right to test their employees or applicants for unlawful drugs at any time.