When Wal-Mart settled a disability discrimination lawsuit brought by two deaf job applicants, it didn’t just pay them lost wages and other damages. The retailer also promised to take specific steps to make it easier for hearing-impaired and other disabled workers to apply for and keep jobs. These measures provide a glimpse of what the government or the courts might look for when considering whether you’ve fulfilled your Americans with Disabilities Act accommodation obligations.
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Deaf Applicants Get Cold Shoulder
The dispute began when Jeremy Fass and William Darnell, who are both deaf, applied for night stocker positions at a Tucson Wal-Mart store. They claimed that when they tried to follow up, the assistant store manager made comments suggesting deaf people couldn’t perform stocker jobs.Fass and Darnell complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sued Wal-Mart for violating the ADA. Wal-Mart ultimately agreed to pay Fass and Darnell $132,500 and to offer them jobs. Plus, it promised to revamp its hiring and training procedures to accommodate hearing-impaired applicants and employees.
New Procedures
Wal-Mart agreed to do the following:
- Require face-to-face prescreening of all applicants.
- Develop procedures for handling accommodation requests.
- Install a Teletype telephone device (TTY) for use by deaf applicants and employees.
- Add captioning to all training videotapes.
- Make sign language interpreters available for training and orientation sessions, staff meetings and performance reviews.
- Provide vibrating pagers for Darnell and Fass to receive messages transmitted over the store’s public address system.
- Revise store safety and evacuation measures – including installing visual fire alarms – to ensure that hearing-impaired employees are safely evacuated in an emergency.
What’s Required
Both the ADA, which applies if you have 15 or more employees, and California law, which covers you if you have 5 or more workers, mandate that you provide disabled applicants equal access to job vacancies throughout the hiring process, from ads to interviews. What is required depends on the nature of your organization. For example, a small company with far fewer resources than Wal-Mart probably wouldn’t have to go so far as installing visual fire alarms.
Steps To Consider
Regardless of your size, it’s important to look for ways to make the application process accessible. There are a number of hiring procedures that can minimize the possibility of your being sued by an applicant. And some of these may even be mandatory depending on your circumstances:
- Publicize information about vacancies in more than one format. For example, list job openings in written ads and on a telephone hotline.
- Accommodate the applicant. This could include providing a sign interpreter, offering assistance in filling out an application, or interviewing at an off-site location accessible to a mobility-impaired applicant. Be prepared to use the free California relay service to translate for hearing- or speech-impaired applicants.
- Document hiring decisions. Keep all applications on file for at least two years. And always document the objective reasons for your hiring decisions and your efforts to find reasonable accommodations for disabled applicants.
- Train managers. Make sure supervisors know how to handle disabled applicants’ job inquiries and accommodation requests. As the Wal-Mart case shows, a single offhand remark can create a major liability.
- Check staffing agency contracts. Since you’re jointly liable with staffing agencies for ADA violations, state in your contracts with them that they will comply with the ADA and other anti-discrimination laws.