Every business should have a basic knowledge about anti-discriminatory handicap and disability laws. At a very general level, the following definition can be proposed: discrimination is any violation of the principle of equality in relation to prohibited criteria. Older discrimination laws used to provide sanctioned regulations which did not sufficiently take into account the differences of the situations to which they applied and were unjust. The related discrimination laws are also classified by the impact of the disability on the amount of the applicant’s resources.
In case-law, the U.S. courts in the 1960s considered that the application of a uniform rule to different situations might violate the principle of equality and be discriminatory. The first category of disability concerns disabled persons able to engage in gainful employment. A classification in a category may not be final. Also, handicap and disability laws entitle a disabled person to obtain a disability card allowing him or her to benefit from certain advantages in the course of everyday life.
A disabled person must attach all the documents requested within a disability discrimination claim letter. A disability discrimination claim letter must also indicate the date from which the person concerned may no longer claim the daily disability benefits due to the stabilization of his state of health. The problems they designate may of course be much older, but they were usually either denied or addressed in some other way. This conception, moreover, is not unique to the US alone.
However, access to the disability discrimination court is only reserved for applicants who have a disability at the time of their application for a disability discrimination claim. The second category of disability includes disabled persons who are absolutely incapable of practicing any profession. The disabled person must also complete a form for the disability discrimination court in which he provides information about his tax situation.
Disabled persons are divided into categories to determine the amount of their payments. In the absence of a reply, the disability discrimination application must be considered as having been refused. Harassment is considered to be a form of discrimination when undesirable behavior related to a disability has the purpose or effect of infringing on a person’s dignity and creating a humiliating, intimidating, degrading, hostile or offensive environment.
In practice, a number of disabled workers who are potentially eligible for a disability discrimination claim are unable to obtain the necessary supporting documents for the administrative recognition of their claim in the course of their careers. If this is the case, the disabled worker is usually informed of this decision by registered mail. It is also possible to switch from one disability category to another according to the evolution of a disabled worker’s health. The disability discrimination court must also reply to a disability discrimination application request.
Indirect disability discrimination occurs when an apparently neutral provision, practice or criterion is likely to result in a particular disadvantage to persons with a particular disability. Depending on a disabled worker’s situation, they should consult a lawyer in order to estimate the amounts they can claim. In U.S. law, this adaptation of the law does not require different situations to be treated in different ways.
However, the plurality and complexity of the contemporary world has led the US courts to take notice of the multiplicity of concrete situations and to adapt, if necessary, the application of the law to realities. Indeed, US law accepts, when there are differences of appreciable or even objective situations, that the general rule should take them into account and is therefore applied differently depending on the situations in question. Therefore, there are different concepts of discrimination, and between law and the social sciences, a multiplicity of concepts of discrimination have been defined.
More concretely, in any situation of choice, decisions and practices will be fair when they are based only on objective criteria and which will appear to be legitimate in the situation in question: qualifications used to choose an employee, resources used to choose a tenant, etc. Therefore, decisions should not depend on the health of the applicant on the one hand and on certain administrative data on the other.
The law also provides various conditions for receiving a disability discrimination claim. In the absence of an initiative by the court, it is the responsibility of the disabled person to carry out the necessary formalities directly.