文章基本信息

标题：Workers’ Liberty, Workers’ Welfare: The Supreme Court Speaks on the Rights of Disabled Employees
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作者：Ronald Bayer
期刊名称：American journal of public health
印刷版ISSN：0090-0036
出版年度：2003
卷号：93
期号：4
页码：540-544
语种：English
出版社：American Public Health Association
摘要：On June 10, 2002, a unanimous US Supreme Court rejected the claim by Mario Echazabal that he had been denied his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act when Chevron USA had refused to employ him because he had hepatitis C. Chevron believed that Echazabal’s exposure to hepatotoxic chemicals in its refinery would pose a grave risk to his health. This case poses critical questions about the ethics of public health: When, if ever, is paternalism justified? Must choice always trump other values? What ought to be the balance between welfare and liberty? Strikingly, the groups that came to Echazabal’s defense adopted an antipaternalistic posture fundamentally at odds with the ethical foundations of occupational health and safety policy. ON JUNE 10, 2002, IN A unanimous decision delivered by Justice David Souter, the US Supreme Court rejected the claim by Mario Echazabal that he had been denied his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) when Chevron USA had refused to employ him. 1 Echazabal, who had hepatitis C, had been rejected for a job that he had performed for years for a contractor to Chevron because the company believed that his exposure to hepatotoxic chemicals in its refinery would pose a grave risk to his health. Even were Chevron correct in its judgment about the dangers—which Echazabal denied—he believed that under the ADA the determination of whether to take such risks was his to make. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California had, in 2000, held that Echazabal was right and that the ADA had been enacted to preclude the kinds of paternalistic judgments Chevron had made. It further held that the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) had erred in 1991 when it decided that workers who would, because of their disabilities, be exposed to risk themselves were excluded from ADA protection. In his dissent from the 2-to-1 decision of the Appeals Court, Judge Stephen Trott warned of the implications of the majority’s denunciation of paternalism: “Long ago we rejected the idea that workers toil at their own peril in the workplace.” 2 In reversing the 9th Circuit Court and Echazabal’s claims, the US Supreme Court at the same time affirmed the legitimacy of the EEOC’s 1991 determination. By any measure, the Echazabal decision is of extraordinary significance for the future of antidiscrimination law and occupational health regulation. To advocates of people with disabilities, the court made an enormous error and opened the way to the evisceration of the ADA. To Chevron and its allies, the court recognized the rights of employers to make sound employment decisions. Beyond matters of law and the all-important issue of congressional intent, this case poses critical questions about the ethics of public health: When, if ever, is paternalism justified? Must choice always trump other values? What ought to be the balance between welfare and liberty? Do the conditions of the labor market, as Norman Daniels long ago argued, 3 so impinge on options that paternalism is justified as a way of protecting workers from making choices under condition of duress? Now that the Supreme Court has spoken so univocally about the EEOC’s interpretive guidelines for the ADA, these matters are of far more than academic interest. There is no question that Congress could amend the ADA to preclude the exclusion of workers who pose only a danger to themselves. Whether it will do so will in large measure depend on the force with which disabilities rights groups press the challenge. It is therefore especially important to understand the root-and-branch rejection of paternalism that informed the arguments of those who supported Echazabal, and which reflected a fundamental rupture with a central tenet of labor legislation.