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Richard J. Bonnie and John Monahan (Editors). Mental Disorder, Work Disability, and the Law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, 308 pages, $27.50.
On March 25, 1997, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released guidelines, under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), governing the treatment of the mentally disabled in the workplace. The guidelines focused, as expected, on employers' duties to provide "reasonable accommodation," to use the technical legal phrase, for the mentally disabled, as the Act requires reasonable accommodation for the physically disabled. The ADA's concept of reasonable accommodation essentially places an affirmative duty on employers to change their job requirements to accommodate the disabled in cases where the employer cannot prove that those requirements are "job related," (i.e., strictly necessary to performance of the job).
The EEOC's guidelines were controversial. One example that the editors give concerns a worker who begins to come to work with a disheveled appearance, which violates a company work rule requiring neat appearance. Co-workers also begin to complain of his rudeness and antisocial behavior. The EEOC says that this worker cannot be terminated if a mental disability is the cause of this behavior. The dress code cannot be shown to be job-related and, in the hypothetical case, the worker has no regular contact with co-workers. In the words of one commentator: "The talk shows and quick-hit journalists cast it like this: The office jerk or, worse, an unwashed loony, is now protected under the Americans With Disabilities Act" (Carter, 1997).
Do the EEOC mental disability guidelines really raise a risk of excessive litigation filed by "jerks" or "loonies" who will try to take advantage of their provisions? More seriously, will they force employers to hire and retain employees who cannot produce, who...