NCJ Number
116522
Date Published
1987
Length
3 pages
Annotation
This letter, from a coalition of 28 national disability groups, to Attorney General Edwin Meese recommends that the Justice Department recall for major review and revision its June 1986 memo regarding application of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act as applied to AIDS, ARC, and the AIDS virus.
Abstract
Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits employers in federally assisted programs from discriminating against the handicapped. According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo of 1986, if employers fire employees they regard as contagious, the employer will not have violated Section 504. DOJ states that asymptomatic carriers of a contagious or a non-contagious disease have no impairment for Section 504 purposes and, therefore, are not protected by the law regardless of the nature or motivation of employer actions against such persons. By asserting that the disease is separate from its effects, the Justice Department memo unjustly, in the Coalition's view, limits the impact of Section 504. The Coalition further states that AIDS is not easily communicable, and to allow irrational fear of contagion to be introduced as a factor in employment decisions means that no one's civil rights are safe. The DOJ is urged to withdraw this interpretation of Section 504.