Kentucky Disability Discrimination Laws

Fair employment practices law: Employers must make reasonable accommodations for employees’ and applicants’ disabilities, unless they can show that these accommodations would cause undue hardship.

Reasonable accommodations can include making existing facilities readily accessible and usable; job restructuring; part-time or modified work schedules; reassignment to a vacant position; acquiring or modifying equipment or devices; adjusting or modifying examinations, training materials, or policies; and providing qualified readers or interpreters.

Undue hardship is an action that requires significant difficulty or expense in terms of:

• the nature and cost of accommodations;
• affected facilities’ overall financial resources and workforce size;
• the impact of accommodations on affected facilities’ expenses, resources, and operations;
• employers’ overall financial resources and workforce size;
• the number, type, and location of employers’ facilities; and
• the type of operations, including workforce composition, structure, and functions, and the geographic separateness and administrative or fiscal relationship of affected facilities.

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Under Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employers, including state and local governments, with 15 or more employees, are prohibited from discriminating against people with disabilities. Title I protects qualified individuals with disabilities in several areas, including job application procedures, hiring, firing, advancement, compensation and job training. It is also unlawful to retaliate against someone for opposing employment practices that discriminate based on disability, or for filing an ADA discrimination charge. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) shares enforcement authority for Title I of the ADA with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which has primary responsibility for enforcing the employment provisions of the law. (Note: Federal employees and job applicants are covered by Section 501 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 instead of the ADA.