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Who wins when the interests of a worker with a disability conflict with those of a more senior, able-bodied coworker? In most cases, the senior worker prevails, says the US Supreme Court in an early May 2002 decision. This ruling is another in a series of recent cases that have generally narrowed the reach of 1990's Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
US Airways v. Barnett
The story of Robert Barnett begins when the cargo worker injured his back in 1990 while employed by US Airways. On his physician's advice, Barnett requested and received a temporary transfer to a less physically demanding job in the mailroom and then was bumped by a coworker with seniority.
Barnett was fired and sued US Airways, claiming his employer failed to provide a permanent mailroom job, which his lawyers argued is the sort of "reasonable accommodation" by employers that the ADA requires.
Barnett and the airline battled each other up to the Supreme Court, which decided that he must demonstrate "special circumstances" that would allow his disability to overrule US Airways' seniority system. The high court's five-justice majority vacated an earlier decision in favor of Barnett and sent the case back to a lower court.
What This Means for Workers with Disabilities
"This is a new rule, better for [employee] plaintiffs in some circumstances and worse for plaintiffs in others," says Eric Schnapper, a law professor at the University of Washington who has served on Barnett's legal team. Walter Dellinger, the top lawyer for US Airways in the Supreme Court case, did not respond to requests for an interview.
Although Schnapper expresses the consensus view, some advocates for workers with disabilities see the high court's decision as heavily favoring employers. "This is another in a string of decisions in which the Court interprets the ADA very narrowly and ignores the intent of Congress," which was to broadly strengthen the civil rights of the workers with disabilities, says Jim Dickson, vice president for government relations at the American Association of People with Disabilities in Washington, DC. People in Dickson's camp believe employers will use the Barnett decision to steamroll the rights of the workers with disabilities, citing the primacy of seniority systems.
On the bright side for workers with disabilities, because the Supreme Court's decision says special circumstances can rule the day, "it's ridiculous to say that seniority systematically trumps the ADA" under the Supreme Court's ruling, says Claudia Center, a Legal Aid Society lawyer in San Francisco who was lead counsel for Barnett in the Supreme Court appeal.
"There are special circumstances all over the place" in US Airways' application of its seniority system, Center says. She believes that in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, a lower court could find that the airline makes so many exceptions to seniority that the system would be minimally affected if the job assignment of a worker with a disability were allowed to trump a more senior coworker's assignment. If this theory is argued successfully, Barnett and workers with disabilities in similar positions could prevail.
Ramifications for Other Workers
The Supreme Court decision also presents a mixed bag for workers with disabilities and their able-bodied colleagues. The good news is that the decision says "when you work out a reasonable accommodation for an employee with disabilities, it's not just done in a vacuum," says Peter Petesch, a partner with Ford & Harrison LLP in Washington, DC. "The rights of other employees matter," including rights afforded by seniority, says Petesch, who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief for the Supreme Court case on behalf of the Society for Human Resource Management.
The bad news for able-bodied workers is that the majority opinion rejects earlier findings by nearly all federal appeals courts that seniority always trumps a worker's need for a disability-related job reassignment. By leaving an opening for workers with disabilities who can demonstrate special circumstances, the Supreme Court revoked any guarantees that employees can set their career paths without worrying about possibly being denied a desirable position needed by a less senior worker with a disability.
