Already there are the first hints in the trade press of the inevitable employer reaction: A few businesses and trade associations, alarmed at the wave of ADA demands and looking for some line of defense, are beginning to think about working to get the various federal personnel-safety regulations tightened in hopes of tying their own hands and requiring them to reject applicants with borderline physical capacity. Since such regulations inevitably tend to be somewhat overbroad, an ironic result would be to bar an occasional individual with compromised vision from particular jobs even though the employer in question, left to its own discretion and knowing in some detail what the job does and does not require, would have judged him an acceptable risk.
In the highway case, for instance, federal Department of Transportation regulations bar monocular drivers from obtaining new licenses to drive heavy tractor-trailers and other vehicles of more than 10,001 pounds, as well as vehicles transporting hazardous materials and passenger vehicles carrying more than 16 persons. When it comes to smaller vehicles and those of other classes, the regulations have heretofore left things up to the employer's discretion. The EEOC now argues that because UPS delivery trucks do not fall into the very heavy class and do not carry passengers or hazardous materials, the company's safety rationale can be dismissed out of hand.
Vehicle class and weight happen to be two of the traffic safety variables that federal regulators can conveniently reach, so they've proceeded to regulate along those lines. Yet the weight and class of a truck are only two variables--and perhaps not always the most important ones--in a safety analysis.
As it happens, there continue to roam the highways quite a few veteran monocular drivers who began operating heavy trucks in less-regulated days and were "grandfathered" into later rules, and some have compiled long accident-free records. Indeed, at one point DOT even tried to liberalize its waiver process to allow more monocular drivers to graduate to heavier trucks if they could demonstrate excellent safety records in lighter vehicles, but it had to stop after it got successfully taken to court by a be-safe-or-we'll-sue group called Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
It's quite possible, when you get down to it, that UPS's own internal rule makes more sense than the DOT regulation. Conceivably the loss of peripheral vision and close-range depth perception associated with monocularity might be a relatively minor disadvantage out on the interstate, where not many hazards are apt to emerge quite unexpectedly from the side of the driver's visual field. The same disadvantages might prove more serious in a regimen of stop-and-go driving in densely populated neighborhoods, with constant backing up and turns into residential driveways--typical duties for a UPS delivery person.
"Blindness" as a metaphor has come to carry distinctly pejorative overtones, implying a foolish or willful overlooking of facts that are plain for all to see. That's a bad rap on those who struggle with literal vision impairments; there's no reason to think they're any less keen on apprehending truth than the rest of us, or any less capable of applying sound judgment to the truths they apprehend.
But it's only too appropriate a metaphor for the diehard advocates of the ADA, who elect ever more foolishly and willfully to direct their attention away from the mounting dangers their pet law poses to the safety, as well as the liberty, of the nation they presume to govern.
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