Washington — In a decision potentially affecting millions of workers and their employers, the Supreme Court Tuesday unanimously narrowed the number of people covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
"Merely having an impairment does not make one disabled for purposes of the ADA," said Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in an opinion continuing the highest court's series of rulings which have tended to narrow the scope of the landmark law.
To be considered disabled under the 1990 legislation, the court said, a person's ailment must extend beyond the workplace and affect their everyday lives.
In language that suggested a significant tightening of the law's application, O'Connor said a lower court erred in ruling in favor of the assembly-line worker in Toyota Motor Co.'s Kentucky plant because she could "still brush her teeth, wash her face, bathe, tend her flower garden, fix breakfast, do laundry, and pick up around the house."
These are among the tasks "that are of central importance to most people's daily lives" and must be "substantially limited" before an individual can qualify for coverage under ADA, the 1990 law intended to protect the disabled from discrimination because of physical impairments, O'Connor wrote.
Ella Williams, the 42-year-old former employee of the Japanese firm's first U.S. plant, could not be reached for comment at her rural Kentucky home.
Williams went to work for Toyota in 1990, soon after it opened the plant in Georgetown, Ky. Within months, after being diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, she was transferred from a job using pneumatic tools for engine assembly to another job inspecting cars in the paint department. This eased her physical problems for a while, but they recurred when she was given a new assignment requiring her to wipe down passing cars at a rate of one car per minute, she said in court. When Toyota refused her request to be reassigned to the paint inspection section, she sued.
The Supreme Court's ruling remanded the case to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which last year held that the ADA applied to Williams because her physical problems substantially limited her ability to perform manual tasks at work.
"This was error," O'Connor wrote.
Carpal tunnel syndrome is an ailment that causes pain in the wrists and hands. It is among the category of repetitive strain injuries, including tendinitis, which afflict an estimated 1 million U.S. workers, according to court records. Besides assembly line workers such as Williams, it has been cited in cases brought by such workers as meat cutters or individuals involved in extensive computer data entry tasks.
The opinion was cheered by business groups. "The court understood that ADA was not meant to create a loophole for people with routine limitations or minor injuries, but was intended for people with significant limitations," said Stephen Bokat, chief attorney for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Bokar said "expanding the ADA ... to include workers who cannot perform a particular job function would have exploded the cost of doing business and dramatically increased all employers' risk for lawsuits from disgruntled workers."
In her opinion, O'Connor said when Congress passed the law it said 43 million Americans suffered from disabilities. "If Congress intended everyone with a physical impairment that precluded the performance of some isolated, unimportant or particularly difficult manual task to qualify as disabled, the number of disabled Americans would surely have been much higher," the justice wrote. She noted, for instance, that 100 million Americans need corrective lenses to see properly.
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