Americans With Disabilities Act Case Study

Option 2 The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed, in effort, to protect the hiring rights of disabled persons in the workforce. It sought to make the bigotry and prejudice that faced disabled people in the hiring process illegal and, also, to lesson the economic burden put on firms to accommodate disabled persons needs in the office by making it illegal to refuse to hire and accommodate to save money. The logic was that if all businesses must, then no business can gain a competitive advantage, which nullifies the economic reasons to not hiring them. It’s obvious that the ADA was passed to resolve an inequality of opportunity, but the kind of inequality which it seeks to rectify is a much more difficult question. By analyzing Cohen’s
This is where the case at hand gets less simple. One can argue that the ADA seeks to fix not one, but two kinds of very different inequalities. First, is the prevalence of ableism, societal prejudice towards those who are disabled. Second, the fact that an employer can gain a competitive advantage by not hiring, and having to provide reasonable accommodation for, the disabled. The former, clearly falls into a bourgeois equality of opportunity society because it is addressing the injustice of having a predisposed prejudice to a group of people and can be compared easily to the prevalence of racism or sexism in a society, i.e. it’s an informal status restriction. No one, I believe, can argue that the discrimination based solely off disliking someone for being disabled is any different than disliking someone based on race or gender or sexuality. The later, dealing with competitive advantage, can be argued to fall into a socialist equality of opportunity. An employer being legally forced to hire someone with a disability, regardless of the financial strain presented by having to accommodate their business for them, is closely related to a society that implements equal pay for all work and provides communal owns of production rather than left-liberal equality or bourgeois equality. It seems as though this is addressing the fact that a
The type of inequality the ADA seeks is in not akin to the inequality both socialist and bourgeois seek to fix, but only bourgeois. The first aspect of the ADA addresses the informal, while, I believe it’s now clear, the second addresses the