Courts Divided on Termination Cases After Drivers Self-Report Alcohol Abuse
This story appears in the Feb. 9 print edition of Transport Topics.
Two conflicting court decisions have muddied the legal waters on how a motor carrier should respond when a driver self-reports a problem with alcohol.
While a Jan. 28 federal appeals court decision in Atlanta upheld the termination of a Crete Carrier Corp. truck driver who was diagnosed as an alcoholic, a Jan. 16 verdict by a federal jury in Arkansas awarded $119,000 to an Old Dominion Freight Line driver who was terminated after admitting to an alcohol problem.
Neither Crete nor Old Dominion returned phone messages seeking comment on the case.
However, Rob Moseley, an attorney with the Smith Moore Leatherwood law firm in Greenville, South Carolina, who is familiar with the cases, said they illustrate the dilemma carriers face when drivers voluntarily come forward to admit they have an alcohol problem.
“For the most part, courts have upheld trucking company decisions that have placed safety over the Americans With Disabilities Act rights of drivers,” Moseley told Transport Topics. “Now, we’ve got these two competing alcoholic cases where somebody confesses to having a problem with alcohol and is diagnosed as being an alcoholic. It’s a very difficult place for a trucking company to be.”
A panel of judges with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an ADA-based discriminatory claim in a lawsuit by Marietta, Georgia-based Sakari Jarvela, an over-the-road driver for Crete from 2003 to 2010.
The court said that the carrier had a right to prohibit Jarvela, who had received a “clinical diagnosis of alcoholism,” from getting behind the wheel.
Jarvela’s physician characterized the diagnosis of alcoholism as one “[you] always carry,” and another doctor who evaluated Jarvela said “an alcoholic is an alcoholic for life,” according to court documents.
Crete ultimately decided that Jarvela was not qualified to drive. But according to Jarvela, the company said it could not “accommodate” a longhaul driver with the continuing-care recommendations that were made by his physician.
The lawsuit against Old Dominion was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Charles Grams, who was terminated under the company’s unwritten policy permanently banning an employee disabled by alcoholism from returning to a driving position.
EEOC attorneys said the Americans with Disabilities Act recognizes alcoholism as a disability, and that federal regulations do not prevent employees who self-report for alcohol abuse from returning to driving positions.
EEOC will not comment on the case because, a spokeswoman said, Old Dominion could appeal.
However, in a post-trial statement, EEOC attorneys Pamela Dixon and Markeisha Savage said, “Old Dominion’s unwritten policy of never returning drivers to driving who self-report alcohol abuse actually endangered the public, because testimony by both a current and former driver indicated they could be reluctant to report a problem because of company policy.”
Richard Pianka, deputy chief counsel for American Trucking Associations, disagreed with the decision.
“It’s extremely disappointing that the EEOC chose to sue a motor carrier simply because it made the common-sense decision not to put an admitted alcohol abuser behind the wheel,” he said. “The rights protected by the ADA are important ones, and ATA and its members are committed to accommodating drivers with disabilities whenever it’s possible to do so without compromising safety.”Pianka added, “But the law does not require motor carriers to roll the dice on the lives of the people they share the highways with by forcing them to employ drivers they reasonably believe to be unqualified to safely operate a commercial motor vehicle.”
