Almost all employment laws apply not only to current employees, but also to applicants, and so one of the most common ones is someone who’s not hired because of a physical disability and that’s known at the time of their interview. For example, we have a case right now, an usher that had worked for 20 years for a company and applied at a related company and he happened to use a walker and the related company decided that just because he was using a walker, they were not going to hire him even though he had been doing the usher position for the past 20 years. That is against the law and the disability discrimination laws apply equally to him as an applicant as if he’d worked there for 20 years. Disability discrimination is another form of discrimination. This is probably one of the most recent amendments to the law, because, until the early 1990s, employees with disabilities could be discriminated against. This is a dramatic step forward in the development of the law that protects employees in the workplace.
