The new regulations for employing people with disabilities will mean major changes in the workplace, and two areas that will be affected are labor relations and workplace flexibility. The regulations instruct as to how employers must accommodate disabled employees and prospective employees, and the regulations now offered on employing people with disabilities are being issued six months after the effective date of an earlier set of rules concerning how businesses must accommodate disabled members of the public. The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against people with mental or physical impairments. The employment rules apply to companies with 25 or more employees at the present time, and within two years to companies with 15 to 24 employees. Companies with fewer than 15 employees are exempt from the job-bias rules (McKee, 1992).
Conflicts are perceived as likely between the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the collective bargaining obligations of employers under the National Labor Relations Act (NRLA), and possible conflicts are seen as limited only by the creativity of lawyers. Some of the conflicts employers may face have been identified as follows:
--The employer's duty to accommodate employees with disabilities under ADA may conflict with seniority provisions in its collective bargaining contract.
--An employer's duty to bargain with a union may conflict with his or her duty under ADA to discuss reasonable accommodations directly with employees who have disabilities.
--If a union files a grievance over issues of the accommodation of a disabled employee in preference to an employee with more seniority, the question arises if this action will amount to retaliation against the disabled person under ADA (Lissy, 1993).
One problem is the ADA itself, which some legal experts say the act contains such vague wording that it will force case-by-case interp
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