Unreasonable Accommodation

The case against the Americans with Disabilities Act

Brian Doherty from the August/September 1995 issue

(Page 7 of 7)

The courts may, however, provide some redress. Currently, as New Haven ADA lawyer Patrick Shea puts it, "The regulations don't say anything about cost-benefit analyses. You might have to spend $100,000 to accommodate someone on a job that is only worth $25,000 to you. Tough. You've been conscripted to provide opportunities."

A decision by Seventh Circuit Appeals Judge Richard Posner, in Lori L. Vande Zande v. State of Wisconsin Department of Administration, may be the key to ending that conscription. Posner concluded that "even if an employer is so large or wealthy...that it would not be able to plead 'undue hardship,' it would not be required to expend enormous sums in order to bring about a trivial improvement....If the nation's employers have potentially unlimited financial obligations to [all] disabled persons, the ADA will have imposed an indirect tax potentially greater than the national debt."

Instead of requiring an open-ended obligation, wrote Posner, "The employee must show that the accommodation is reasonable in the sense both of efficacious and of proportional to costs. Even if the prima facie showing is made, the employer has an opportunity to prove that...the costs are excessive in relation either to the benefits of the accommodation or to the employer's financial survival or health."

That precedent could go a long way toward clearing up the issues in Frank Cronin's cases of depressed secretaries, and providing a clearer understanding of what the employment aspect of the law requires. (It could be applied to access issues as well.) It is a good first step, and it has the ADA activist community worried.

Sitting in the handicapped-accessible restaurant that cost him more months and more thousands of dollars and more grief than he could have imagined, Blair Taylor says, "I want to be helpful because I'm a nice person. I don't want to be forced to do something to help you to the detriment of my own well-being."

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