Essential Job Functions

Donna Rae

Is anyone aware of language that says a job description "may have up to 15 essential functions". I cannot find anything in the ADA compliance Manual or in Assembly Bill 2222 (California). The data base we purchased for Personnel has a limit on the tasks allowed to enter and the programmer says it was an ADA set limit.

jimlegal

Without research I am not aware of any. However I would ask our forum pro's and the folks at HRhero for help!

Hatchetman

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 04-09-03 AT 06:46PM (CST)[/font][p]I am not aware of anything that limits essential job duties to 15. It is possible in some very early drafts of ADA,before it became law, that there was a suggestion that 15 job duties would be the limit. In early drafts of ADA there was an identification that there were some 900 qualifying disabilities. By the time the law was enacted the list of the 900 was dropped in favor of the assessment that is used now (and was part of the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Section 504).

It is also possible that the programmer didn't know what he was talking aobut and just used that as an excuse rather than saying, "that's all we could program based upon our consideration that most likely there won't be more than 15 for any one job."

Additionally, to say that a job description is limited to 15 essential duties as a requiment of ADA or EEOC, doesn't make sense since ADA and EEOC do NOT require written job descriptions in the first place (although, they are advisable to have).

But the reality does come into play that the larger the number of job duties could result in some of those duties being performed less frequently as others. ONE of the considerations in what makes any duty essential as compared to non-essential is how frequently the duty is performed. Obviously, there are other considerations as well that help determine when a duty is essential or not.

A job with 15 distinct duties or more may not be impossible for each to be done frequently enough. But I think it could lead EEOC to conclude that some of those duties may not be essential if it is a close call in the overall determination when some are not done as substantively frequent as others.