Inside the Exclusive: The EEOC’s New Enforcement Priorities, Part 3—Disability Discrimination

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Scott Kelly: All right, welcome back everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode. We are here at The Broadmoor resort in Colorado. We’re Tae Phillips from the Birmingham office, Jim Paul from the St. Louis and Tampa office, and I’m Scott Kelly from Birmingham. We presented on a topic dealing with the EEOC’s enforcement priorities in the new Trump administration, and today we’re going to hear a little bit more on a topic of the EEOC’s focus on disability discrimination in this new environment. Jim, you’re going to walk us through what you’re seeing in that regard, so thank you.

Jim Paul : Yeah, thanks, Scott. So, to contrast what we talked about in the last episode with regard to religious rights and the anti-Christian bias movement within the administration, with regard to disability awareness and accessibility, there’s been stark silence. No initiatives or executive orders specifically encouraging or discouraging or dismantling any disability access or disability affirmative action, DEI type of initiatives, but I think the silence says a lot, right? Not only has there been kind of a neutral or silent approach to this, but there’s been a mass exodus or mass layoff situation across Department of Justice, specifically the Civil Rights Division, and so there isn’t as much power within the Department of Justice to investigate disability access and disability discrimination. Similar too within the EEOC, the limited resources based on either layoffs or voluntary departures from these agencies has reallocated the remaining personnel to other issues, other hot topics, including like we talked about, the national origin anti-American bias concern, and then also the anti-Christian bias concern.
So, that’s resulted in less investigations, audits, concerns coming from the federal government, but what we’ve seen then to pick up the slack, we’ve definitely seen an increase in private attorney civil action and enforcement, and then of course the state agencies are all over the map. This may depend on whether it’s a discrimination agency in a red state versus a blue state, but the states are certainly left to their own devices on how aggressively they want to pursue disability rights, disability access, and affirmative action for that protected characteristic or that situation.
As I said in our last episode with regard to religious discrimination and accommodation, the ADA has a similar prohibition on discrimination, but then also a proactive requirement that employers reasonably accommodate disabilities that are reasonably able to be accommodated without imposing an undue hardship on the employer. So, kind of the action items on the disability front is that you as employers need to be aware and keep your eyes and ears open to requests in the workplace that could be based on a disability or a medical condition. Most, if not all, of us will be considered disabled at some point during our life for some condition or some deterioration based on age, and so those accommodation requests obviously should be processed and analyzed and dealt with appropriately, so that employees that can be reasonably accommodated in the workplace—that happens and that occurs within your organization.
Of course, the private claims, private attorneys, and your employees are still able to enforce through civil action those rights, even if the federal government is kind of taking a more laissez-faire neutral approach to disability rights and affirmative action on that front. Of course, we previously had, and maybe Scott wants to talk a little bit about this, actual reporting requirements based on disability status, veteran status, disabled veteran status, and some of the changes and dismantling of those requirements going forward, but it’s really just stay the course with regard to your disability access and disability accommodation policies.

Scott Kelly: All right, well, thank you, Jim. We will be talking about gender identity issues in the workplace and the EEOC’s focus on our next episode, so please join us soon. Thank you.

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