Levonian said:
I just spent the last half hour looking up the subject of disability discrimination, and I found out that making fun of a person’s disability is a form of harassment, and is legally considered to be the same thing as sexual or racial harassment.
This is excerpted from the ADA Quarterly, a publication of the Ohio Rehabilitation Services Commission.
http://www.rsc.ohio.gov
http://www.rsc.ohio.gov/Publications/ADAqtrly/ADA_March_April.pdf
Harassment claims garner increased attention. Imagine a supervisor who outright resents having a person with a disability among his staff. The supervisor makes the subordinate’s workday miserable,
mocking the disability and subjecting the worker to requirements that the rest of the staff need not meet. The harassment gets so bad that the worker resigns. Does the worker have a cause of action against the employer? Although the language of the ADA doesn’t explicitly create a cause of action for harassment, federal regulatory agencies charged with enforcement have inferred the availability of such a claim from the statute’s general prohibition against retaliation and coercion. While federal appeals courts have been reluctant to explicitly declare that such a cause of action exists, many decisions have at least implicitly recognized the availability of a claim based on an allegedly hostile work environment. For example, in Lindgren v. Hyatt Corp., plaintiff Susan Lindgren, who is blind, was hired by Hyatt in January 1997 to work as a phone operator. Terminated about a year and a half later for sleeping on the job, Lindgren sued and claimed that other employees also slept on the job and were not terminated. Lindgren also added claims of emotional distress and harassment on the basis of disability.
As to harassment, Lindgren claimed that her supervisor mimicked a voice synthesizer she used and laughed at her. She asserted that the harassment worsened following her complaints to higher management, saying that the supervisor refused to allow her to take bathroom breaks without permission and even threw away all of her Braille books. When the employer moved for summary judgment, the court refused to dismiss the claim of disability based harassment. Noting that the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had not yet explicitly established such a cause of action, the court nonetheless said that the Eighth Circuit "has not foreclosed application of this cause of action in appropriate circumstances." In refusing to dismiss the claim, the court clearly indicated its willingness to find for Lindgren on a claim of disability harassment. "This court simply cannot turn its head from this type of harassment," Judge Michael J. Davis wrote, "made all the more severe and pervasive because it preys on the plaintiff’s very disability—her blindness." Disability based harassment is a viable cause of action under the ADA, and it’s one that’s appearing in cases with increasing frequency. Claims available under different titles 42 USC § 12203(b) is the section of the ADA that has been read to supply a cause of action for disability-based harassment. It’s located among the law’s miscellaneous provisions and reads as follows: It shall be unlawful to coerce, intimidate, threaten, or interfere with any individual in the exercise or enjoyment of, or on account of his or her having exercised or enjoyed, or on account of his or her having aided or encouraged any other individual in the exercise or enjoyment of, any right granted or protected by this chapter. In combination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have indicated that disability based harassment is separately prohibited under Titles I through III of this statute. The EEOC’s Title I regulation implementing the statutory retaliation provision is found at 29 CFR § 1630.12, and it expands the statutory language by explicitly barring disability based harassment. As to Title II, the DOJ includes an example of unlawful disability based harassment in its Technical Assistance Manual, saying that it would violate Title II for a private individual to harass an individual with cerebral palsy in an effort to prevent the disabled individual from attending a concert at a state park. In the appendix to its regulation implementing Title III of the statue, the DOJ says that it would be a violation of the title for a restaurant customer to harass an individual with a disability in order to try to prevent the individual from patronizing a restaurant. From Disability Compliance Bulletin 9/21/00 © 2000 LRP Publications.
who have same problem with Target to sue them for themselves for their own money too. If there are lot of deaf people sue Target with their own case. It will cost Target A LOT of money. That will truly teach Target a HUGE lesson to respect deaf right and be more seriously carefully with deaf people. Deaf people have more power than hearing in some way.
