New Hampshire Disability Discrimination Laws

Employers must make reasonable accommodations for qualified employees’ and applicants’ known disabilities, unless employers can show that these accommodations would impose undue hardship on their business operations. Reasonable accommodations can include making existing facilities readily accessible to persons with disabilities, restructuring jobs, modifying work schedules, reassigning employees to vacant positions, providing qualified readers or interpreters, and modifying equipment or devices. Qualified means that employees and applicants with disabilities can, with or without reasonable accommodation, perform the essential functions of the jobs they hold or seek. If the employer prepared a written job description before advertising or interviewing applicants for a job, this description is evidence of the job’s essential functions.

Employers can’t deny employment opportunities, compensation, or terms, conditions, and privileges of employment to employees and applicants based on their need for reasonable accommodations.

Undue hardship means an action requiring significant difficulty or expense. In determining whether an accommodation would impose an undue hardship on an employer, factors to be considered include:

• the nature and cost of the accommodation needed;
• the overall financial resources of the facility involved; the number of persons employed at such facility; the effect on expenses and resources; or the impact otherwise of such accommodation upon the operation of the facility;
• the overall financial resources of the employer; the overall size of the business of an employer with respect to the number of its employees; and the number, type, and location of its facilities; and
• the type of operation or operations of the employer, including the composition, structure, and functions of the workforce of such employer; and the geographic separateness, or administrative or fiscal relationship, of the facility in question to the employer.

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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.