NRA, NCCR: ADA ruling is supreme: Disabilities will be harder to prove; Waffle House case decision pending

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 21, 2002 by Paul Frumkin, Richard Martin

WASHINGTON -- Experts are calling this month's Supreme Court decision making it more difficult for partially disabled workers to seek special treatment under the Americans with Disabilities Act a positive development for foodservice employers.

However, the high court still could extend more ADA protections to workers with disabilities in a pending decision on a case it heard last October involving a Waffle House cook who was fired after suffering an on-the-job seizure. At issue in that case is whether the ADA's provisions for obtaining injunctive relief and damages in federal court are trumped by arbitration agreements like the one signed by the cook when he was hired.

Separately, the Justice Department and foodservice industry representatives this month were scheduled to discuss proposed ADA amendments that would require more physical alterations to businesses, including lower countertops and tables, wider aisles and larger kitchens.

In the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling this month the justices declared that a disability cannot be measured exclusively by a person's ability to perform specific workrelated tasks. The person also must demonstrate that the disability places significant restrictions on the way he lives his daily life.

The ruling is expected to deter the number of ADA-related cases involving less-serious workplace disabilities. "This is a pretty significant decision," said James M. Coleman, general counsel for the National Council of Chain Restaurants. "It's definitely favorable for employers and the [restaurant] industry."

Steven Grover, the National Restaurant Association's vice president for health and safety, regulatory affairs, called the court's decision "a positive response. It was needed. [The court is] starting to narrow the scope of the ADA a bit. It's focusing on folks with more serious disabilities."

The court's ruling is expected to have far-reaching repercussions on what constitutes impairment under the ADA. By a 9-to-0 vote, the high court overturned a lower court ruling that said a worker at a auto plant suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome was disabled in the "major life activity of performing manual tasks."

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in her opinion, stated that to "be substantially limited in performing manual tasks [and covered by the ADA], an individual must have an impairment that prevents ... activities that are of central importance to most people's daily live O'Connor cited such activities as brushing one's teeth or doing the laundry as examples. "The impairment's impact must also be permanent or long-term," she wrote.

"Basically," the NCCR's Coleman observed, "it says that when you are trying to evaluate whether an employee is disabled, you have to look at it on a big-picture basis, not on a job-task basis."

He added that the decision was "not surprising," given other, recent Supreme Court's decisions that have sought to define further and limit the ADA's scope.

In a high-court decision last year involving a nursing home operator in West Virginia, the plaintiff's attorney was denied fees because an alleged ADA violation had been resolved before the trial verdict was reached. However, the NRA's Grover said that he hadn't observed any noticeable decline in the number of "drive-by" lawsuits as a result of that decision.

However, he said the Supreme Court this month had "brought the focus back to what had originally been envisioned by the people who passed [the ADA]. There's been a gradual push for expansion of the act to cover anything we would call a malady. If you go back and look at the congressional record, that was not the original intent."

However, the court's pending decision in the case of former Waffle House cook Eric Scott Baker poses a new set of concerns for employers who were counting on arbitration agreements to keep ADA damage claims from being heard by potentially generous juries or leading to new restrictions.

Last spring, only a month after ruling that employers can force workers to resolve job disputes though arbitration, the high court agreed to hear an appeal by the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission on behalf of Baker. When he was fired by a West Columbia, S.C., Waffle House in 1994 after suffering a seizure at work, he complained to the EEOC rather than file for arbitration. The commission sued Norcross, Ga.-based Waffle House under ADA provisions and won a federal District Court ruling that arbitration could not be enforced.

Waffle House appealed to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court, which "held there was an arbitration agreement but said the EEOC could be involved, although it would have to pursue relief under arbitration," explained Stephen Floyd Fisher, the Greenville, S.C., attorney for Waffle House.

The EEOC, however, pressed on to the Supreme Court, hoping to win permission for a trial that could grant a permanent injunction against Waffle House's allegedly unlawful employment practices and force the chain to implement anti-discrimination programs while giving Baker back pay, reinstatement and punitive damages.