Montana Disability Discrimination Laws

Fair employment practices law: Employers must provide reasonable accommodations if needed for the known physical or mental limitations of qualified employees and applicants with disabilities, unless these accommodations would impose undue hardship on employers or endanger anyone’s health or safety. Employers can’t deny equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants with disabilities because of their need for reasonable accommodations. Employees and applicants with disabilities are qualified if they can perform their essential job functions with or without reasonable accommodations.

Reasonable accommodations can include:

• making existing worksites readily accessible to and usable by employees and applicants with disabilities;
• job restructuring and part-time or modified work schedules;
• reassigning employees to vacant positions for which they are qualified;
• acquiring or modifying equipment or devices;
• adjusting or modifying examinations and training materials or policies; and
• providing qualified readers or interpreters.

Reasonable accommodations don’t include accommodations that would endanger anyone’s health or safety. Before taking adverse action on these grounds, however, employers should independently assess whether the accommodations would create a reasonable probability of substantial harm; failure to do so creates a disputable presumption that this justification is a pretext for discrimination based on disability.

Undue hardship is an action that requires significant difficulty or extraordinary cost, when considering:

• the nature and expense 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 employers’ operations, including their workforce composition, structure, and functions and the geographic separateness and administrative or fiscal relationship between employers and their 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.