New England Biz Law Update
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit claiming that UPS violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by maintaining a discriminatory policy of refusing to hire or reasonably accommodate deaf or hearing-impaired individuals for driver positions of vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds.
According to the EEOC, the Department of Transportation (DOT) provides a process which allows deaf or hearing-impaired individuals to drive trucks that weigh more than 10,000 pounds through a program that exempts them from a hearing test and instead uses alternative criteria to ensure an equivalent level of driver safety.
The EEOC claims that the UPS policy is an illegal qualification standard that screens out disabled individuals. The agency says that the policy has resulted in a class of aggrieved individuals being denied driver positions, even though they could have completed training and performed the jobs at issue with reasonable accommodations.
The EEOC filed suit after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.
The case, EEOC v. UPS, Civil Action No. 1:23-cv-14021, was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
“Just because someone is deaf does not mean they cannot drive safely,” said Gregory Gochanour, EEOC’s regional attorney in Chicago. “That is why the Department of Transportation grants hearing exemptions.”
Acting Chicago District Director Diane Smason said, “Discriminatory policies that exclude deaf individuals from good jobs like the ones at issue in this case, without any valid reason, are illegal under the ADA.”
UPS has reportedly stated that it is modifying driver training for those who are deaf and hearing-impaired and would start accepting exemptions to the DOT commercial driver hearing standard for operators of its trucks in January 2024.
