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February 14, 2005
Employer regarded alcoholic as being disabled
If 10 percent of the population is alcoholic, that's enough to populate the nation's top 15 cities. And a lot of these folks are in the work force.
Are alcoholics "disabled" under the ADA? Some are and some are not. It's an individual thing. To be disabled, the individual must (1) have a physical or mental impairment that (2) substantially limits (3) one or more of the major life activities of that individual. Under that definition, a huge number of alcoholics are not disabled. They may have an impairment, but that impairment does not substantially limit a major life activity. They can walk, see, hear, work, and so on. Maybe not perfectly, and maybe not all the time, but enough so they are not "substantially limited."
It is noteworthy that the ADA protects not only those who are actually disabled, but also those who are "regarded as" being disabled. That means the employer regarded the employee as fitting all three of the numbered items above.
That was one of the issues in Moorer v. Baptist Memorial Health Care System [Full text pdf] (6th Cir 02/11/2005), involving the discharge of a hospital administrator. Did the employer regard William Moorer as being disabled? After a bench trial, the trial court answered "yes," and the 6th Circuit affirmed. The court's answer to that question is quite revealing both as to the employer's thought process and the trial judge's thought process.
First, Moorer's supervisor clearly believed Moorer was an alcoholic. The bigger question was whether the supervisor perceived Moorer as being substantially limited in his ability to work, that is, unable to work in a broad class of jobs or a broad class of jobs (not just the specific job he had).
Second, the trial court found that the supervisor believed that alcoholism was the root cause of Moorer's inability to perform his current job - hospital administrator. Of course that established only a belief that there was an inability to perform one job.
Third, the court used interesting logic to reach the conclusion that the employer regarded Moorer as unable to perform a broad range of jobs. The trial court found substantial evidence that the employer "concocted pretextual justifications" for firing Moorer. The supervisor testified that she relied on a written report from a fire marshal plus a written report from another government agency, reports written after the discharge took place. The supervisor testified that she relied on a letter from the chief of the medical staff at one of Moorer's hospitals, but Moorer's name was not mentioned in the letter, and the author testified that he did not intend the letter to be critical of Moorer's administration of the hospital.
So there was pretext, but there was one more step in the logic. The trial judge decided that by showing that the employer perceived Moorer as being unable to perform managerial work for the employer, that indicated that the employer perceived him as unable to perform a broad class of work. As the 6th Circuit put it, the fact that the employer "believed Moorer's alcoholism made him unable to perform his hospital administrator job, which required a broad range of managerial skills, permits the reasonable inference that [the employer] believed that Moorer's alcoholism rendered him incapable of performing a substantial number of managerial jobs."
This case shows that there is plenty of room for education about alcoholism and other disabilities.
Posted February 14, 2005 by Ross Runkel, Editor at LawMemo, publisher of Employment Law Memo. Try it.
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