A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that United Parcel Service Inc. illegally discriminated against hundreds of deaf employees by barring them from driving delivery vans.
The ruling could prompt employers to review their hiring policies and job requirements to make sure none of them exclude broad groups of people without a justifiable reason. Companies that fail to take such steps could find themselves vulnerable to similar suits from disabled employees.
In its decision, the San Francisco-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2004 lower-court ruling that the parcel delivery company's policy of denying driving jobs to hearing-impaired employees violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The appeals panel held that employers must justify policies or job requirements that automatically exclude a group of disabled people.
"If you want to use a physical criteria to exclude a whole class of people from a job, you need to be able to prove that substantially all the people with that criteria can't do the job safely," said Lawrence Gartner, a partner with Baker & Hostetler in Los Angeles who represents management in employment law cases.
UPS said it disagreed with the court's ruling and would consider an appeal.
"We believe this case is about safety, and it has nothing to do with disability or discrimination," said Laurie Mallis, a spokeswoman for the company.
Deaf UPS employees said the ruling raised their hopes that they would one day be allowed to drive for the company.
"I have been waiting for this opportunity ever since I started working at UPS," said Barbaranti Oloyede, a UPS employee for 15 years.
"It has been my dream to drive a UPS package van. I can't wait to sign up for a promotion," Oloyede said.
The fact that other delivery companies use deaf drivers made UPS' blanket exclusion a difficult policy to justify under a straightforward reading of the Americans with Disabilities Act, said Stanford University law professor Mark Kelman.
The disability act "generally demands highly individualized findings, and UPS wasn't permitting very much individual analysis" of any deaf applicant's qualifications for the job, he said. "They were just rejecting the hearing-impaired employees."
The ruling puts employers in a "damned if they do and damned if they don't" situation, said Joe Beachboard, a Los Angeles lawyer who represents employers.
