Most people know the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects employees and applicants who have disabilities. Fewer know it also protects people who don’t have a disability themselves but are closely connected to someone who does.
The ADA defines unlawful discrimination to include “excluding or otherwise denying equal jobs or benefits to a qualified individual because of the known disability of an individual with whom the qualified individual is known to have a relationship or association.” 42 U.S.C. § 12112(b)(4). The implementing regulation extends that protection to a “family, business, social or other relationship or association” with a person who has a known disability. The relationship doesn’t have to be a marriage or a parent-child bond; any known close relationship or association can trigger protection, so long as the employer’s decision was motivated by the other person’s disability.
The purpose is to stop employers from acting on unfounded stereotypes about people connected to someone with a disability. The key question is whether the decision was motivated by the relationship, not how close it is. The EEOC’s own guidance offers an example: an employer overhears an employee mention that he tutors at a homeless shelter known for placing people with HIV/AIDS in jobs, then fires him out of concern for its image. That’s a violation, even though the employee is only minimally acquainted with the shelter’s HIV-positive beneficiaries, because the firing was motivated by concern about the disabilities of people he associated with.
Examples of Prohibited Conduct
An employer can’t refuse to hire or fire someone because of a known association with a person who has a disability, such as declining to hire a qualified applicant because he has a child with a disability and might miss work, or firing an employee because his boyfriend is HIV-positive out of an unfounded fear of transmission through food handling. An employer can’t deny a promotion for the same reason, as when a manager rejects an applicant after learning her mother and sister had breast cancer and assuming she’ll develop it too. Other adverse decisions are prohibited as well, like transferring an employee to a lower-paying job to limit contact with her because her son has an intellectual disability.
The provision also covers benefits. An employer can’t deny health coverage available to other employees because of a dependent’s disability, or offer a job without the same dependent coverage others receive. The same goes for other privileges of employment, such as telling an employee she can’t bring her daughter, who has Down Syndrome, to a company party. And an employer can’t allow harassment based on the association to continue. In one EEOC example, a supervisor’s relationship with an employee sours after learning the employee’s wife has a severe disability; he sets unrealistic deadlines, imposes stricter rules, and removes the employee from projects, commenting that coworkers can’t count on him given “his wife’s medical problems.” Separate EEOC guidance on caregiving reinforces the point in hiring: refusing to hire a single parent of a child with a disability, assuming caregiving will make the worker unreliable, is unlawful stereotyping based on association.
What Counts as an Adverse Action, and What It Takes to Prove the Claim
A viable claim generally requires a tangible employment action, something that actually changes the terms of someone’s job, not merely an isolated remark. Termination, refusal to hire, demotion, denial of a promotion, reduced compensation, and denied or reduced benefits all typically qualify, as can a decision that materially changes the terms of employment, such as a transfer to an objectively worse position, a real cut in hours, or reassignment to diminished duties. When an employer denies a job, a promotion, or another benefit because it assumes an employee will need to miss work to care for someone with a disability, that assumption is exactly the kind of stereotype this provision is designed to catch.
Because this is still a disability discrimination claim, the employee has to show the associated person has a disability under the ADA, and that the employer knew about both the disability and the relationship. The employee also has to show the adverse action happened under circumstances reasonably suggesting the associate’s disability was a motivating factor. It doesn’t have to be the only reason for the decision, just a factor that influenced it, and it can be shown through circumstantial evidence like comments revealing concern about the disability.
The association provision exists because assumptions about caregiving, contagion, and capability harm not just people with disabilities but the people connected to them. An employer doesn’t need anything against disability in the abstract to run afoul of this law; it only needs to act on the belief that an employee’s connection to someone with a disability makes that employee less reliable or less worth investing in. The law has consistently treated that assumption as illegal.
We always recommend speaking to an employment attorney if you feel you have been targeted because of your association with someone who has a disability. Call our office at 713-337-1333 or schedule an appointment here.