Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

ADA of 1990

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Colorado Technical University

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

Term Paper Professor William H. Louis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for MGMT235 Introduction to Business Law

By Student’s Name Omitted by Instructor Colorado Springs, Colorado March, 2014

ADA of 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 The Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 prohibited discrimination against specifically protected groups of individuals. Title VII of the CRA made it unlawful for employers to

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discriminate against individuals based on their race, religion, sex, color or national origin. A few years later, Congress passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 which added age discrimination to CRA's list of protected groups. The next Congressional effort to eliminate employment discrimination was the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 which provided some protection to individuals with disabilities; however, the Rehabilitation Act’s provisions only applied to federal, state and local government employment practices (Kohl & Greenlaw, 1992). The Rehabilitation Act failed to protect American workers with disabilities from employment discrimination. To correct this situation, Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 which essentially extended the provisions of the Rehabilitation Act to private sector businesses employing more than 25 full-time employees. The ADA not only prohibited discrimination against the disabled in employment practices, but it also provided disabled Americans with protections against discrimination in public accommodations and other areas (Kohl & Greenlaw, 1992). Congress further expanded ADA protections with the passage of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, a measure which has been criticized by the legal community for increasing businesses’ exposure to litigation (Bleau, 2008). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is the primary agency responsible for the...