A guide to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for employers

What is the Americans with Disability Act (ADA)?

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal law that passed in 1990 that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in many aspects of society—including employment, transportation, public accommodations, communications, and access to state and local government programs and services. To make it even more complex, most states and many municipalities have their own laws that are closely modeled after the ADA. 

If you don’t feel like reading the full text of the law, we can give you the SparkNotes: it’s illegal for covered entities (i.e. employers) to discriminate against qualified individuals with disabilities. 

Still unclear? Understandable, so let’s break it down:

Covered entities under the ADA

The ADA applies to companies with 15 or more employees and prohibits discrimination in all aspects of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoffs, training, fringe benefits, and other terms and conditions of employment. 

Defining disability

The ADA protects employees and job seekers with disabilities. The ADA defines a person with a disability as someone who:

• Has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities,
• Has a record of such an impairment (like cancer in remission), or
• Is perceived by others as having such an impairment (this could be severe burns or the loss of a limb)

Official ADA regulations do not list all disabilities—there are a wide variety and not all disabilities are visible. Here are some additional examples from the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division (this is not an exhaustive list!):

• Cancer
• Diabetes
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• HIV
• Autism
• Cerebral palsy
• Deafness or hearing loss
• Blindness or low vision
• Epilepsy
• Mobility disabilities such as those requiring the use of a wheelchair, walker, or cane
• Intellectual disabilities
• Major depressive disorder
• Traumatic brain injury

Qualified individuals

To be protected under the ADA, an employee or job seeker with a disability must also be qualified to perform the “essential functions of the job” with or without reasonable accommodations that do not pose undue hardship on the employer.

Essential job functions: 

These are often (unhelpfully) defined as the basic job duties. This phrase exists to ensure that anyone with a disability will not be deemed unqualified because of their inability to perform marginal job functions. If there is a written job description, that’s usually a good place to start to determine essential job functions.

With or without reasonable accommodation:

This can sometimes trip people up, but it just means that employees should be able to perform essential job duties on their own or with the help of a reasonable accommodation. 

Undue hardship

The agency that enforces the ADA, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), defines “undue hardship” as something that is significantly difficult or expensive. It focuses on the resources and circumstances of the specific employer related to the specific accommodation requested. 

ADA requests from employees and ADA discrimination

ADA discrimination can manifest in a number of ways, but two common methods are:

• Treating qualified employees or job seekers with disabilities differently based on their disabilities in the terms and conditions of employment
• Failing to provide reasonable accommodations to otherwise qualified individuals with disabilities (unless doing so poses an undue hardship)

Assessing ADA requests requires an individualized, case-by-case assessment. To do this, employers must engage in an interactive dialogue with employees (and their health care providers, if necessary). 

The interactive process

We have a whole guide to the interactive process here, but to summarize, employers must:

1. Recognize the request from the employee
2. Begin the interactive process
3. Explore reasonable accommodation ideas and gather information (in partnership with the employee)
4. Give an initial assessment
5. Implement the accommodation 

At Cocoon, we think of accommodations in two categories: leave accommodations, and non-leave accommodations. We’ll get into leave accommodations here, but check out our non-leave accommodation checklist for more information on that route.

Leave as an ADA accommodation

A reasonable accommodation can include modifying existing leave policies and providing leave even when it’s not covered by existing policies or state/federal leave laws (EEOC). But there is no rule that says an employer must always provide leave as an accommodation. It depends on the facts in each situation (hence the case-by-case assessment). How much time does the employee need? Is the leave sought for a definite or indefinite duration? Will the leave time be continuous or intermittent? Has the employee already taken leave? The list goes on… and on and on. To add another layer of complexity for employers, they must integrate ADA with the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which was passed three years after the ADA in 1993, plus state family and medical leave laws.  

The FMLA covers employers with 50 or more employees and provides medical leave rights to employees who meet certain eligibility criteria such as tenure (12 months) and work hours (1,250 hours in the 12-month period immediately preceding leave). Because employers must provide leave under both the FMLA and ADA, the challenge is knowing when and how to do so. For example, if an employee can take FMLA leave, they don’t need ADA leave as a reasonable accommodation. But if employees need medical leave and they are not eligible for—or have exhausted—FMLA leave, the ADA suddenly becomes front and center, and employers must consider providing unpaid, job-protected leave as an ADA reasonable accommodation (if providing the leave doesn’t cause undue hardship).

Where to learn more about employer responsibilities under the ADA

Hopefully after reading this quick primer on the ADA, you have a better understanding of what it is and who is eligible. For a deeper dive into the topic, we recommend the following resources:

• US Dept of Justice, Civil Rights Division: Introduction to the Americans with Disabilities Act
• US Dept of Labor: Americans with Disabilities Act Overview
• Job Accommodation Network (JAN): Employers’ Practical Guide to Reasonable Accommodation under the ADA

Build a more inclusive workplace, stress less about compliance

Cocoon’s mission is to empower every working person to focus on the important things in life when it matters most—this is absolutely inclusive of workers with disabilities who have every right to the same opportunities as everyone else. Disability discrimination laws are not getting any easier to administer, and they aren’t going away. Workers deserve these rights, and People teams deserve solutions that help them streamline the process. We’re excited to usher in a new era of more inclusion and accessibility for Cocoon, especially as we continue to expand on this functionality.