Analysts said that the U.S. Supreme Court's Jan. 7 ruling on a case involving the Americans with Disabilities Act will exclude thousands of workers from ADA protections when they are injured on the job.

Congress passed the ADA in 1990 to protect the civil rights of the disabled. In addition to requiring the right of access to transportation, housing, public buildings and other facets of everyday life, the law requires employers to provide accommodations for the disabled in the workplace when they are able to do jobs with those accommodations.

The case, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. v. Williams, involved Ella Williams, who worked in Toyota's Georgetown, Ky., auto assembly plant. Williams developed carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive stress injury that causes pain in the wrist, hand, and arm.

After Williams was transferred to another job in paint quality control, the duties for that job were expanded to include wiping the cars with a highlight of oil as they passed on the assembly line at the rate of one per minute. She asked that the job be returned to the original duties because her injury prevented her from performing the expanded duties. When the company refused her request for accommodation and fired her on the grounds of poor attendance, she filed suit.

In the unanimous decision written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court said that to be covered by ADA, "an individual must have an impairment that prevents or severely restricts the individual from doing activities that are of central importance to most people's daily lives. . . . The impairment's impact must also be permanent or long-term."

O'Connor said that "the manual tasks unique to any particular job are not necessarily important parts of most people's lives." She said the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which upheld Williams in her lawsuit, "should not have considered [Williams'] inability to do such manual work in her specialized assembly line job as sufficient proof that she was substantially limited in performing manual tasks."

O'Connor said that "household chores, bathing and brushing one's teeth" were the types of activities that the appeals court should have considered instead of work-related activities.

Kathleen Blank, an attorney with the federal National Council on Disability, said the decision "is clearly a decision in favor of employers, giving them more latitude to refuse to make accommodations" for disabled workers required by ADA.

Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said the ruling "is another in a series of decisions where the Supreme Court has inappropriately restricted the scope of who is disabled enough to have civil rights protections under the ADA."

Imparato charged that the high court ignored Congress' "explicit use of an inclusive definition of 'disability' in the ADA" to narrow the scope of the law.

The "ruling needs to be considered in the context of the staggering fact that more than two-thirds of working age disabled people are not working," Imparato said. "When the court makes it harder for disabled workers to get needed accommodations and remain employed, it exacerbates a serious social problem of unemployment and underemployment among adults with disabilities. The issue in an employment discrimination case should not be whether the worker was disabled enough to qualify for fair treatment but whether they were treated fairly," he said.

The AFL-CIO had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case that focused on the serious and disabling nature of repetitive motion injuries.