South Carolina Disability Discrimination Laws

Employers must make reasonable accommodations for the known physical or mental limitations of otherwise qualified employees and applicants with disabilities, unless employers can show that these accommodation would impose undue hardship on business operations. Employers can’t deny employment opportunities to otherwise qualified employees and applicants with disabilities based on their need for reasonable accommodations for their physical or mental impairments.

Reasonable accommodations can include:

• making existing workplace facilities accessible and usable;
• job restructuring;
• part-time or modified work schedules;
• reassignment to vacant positions;
• acquiring or modifying equipment or devices;
• adjusting or modifying examinations, training materials or policies; and
• providing qualified readers or interpreters.

Undue hardship means that an action requires significant difficulty or expense when considering the:

• nature and cost of a needed accommodation;
• affected facility’s overall financial resources and workforce size;
• accommodation’s impact on the affected facility’s expenses, resources, and operations;
• employer’s overall financial resources;
• employer’s overall business size in terms of workforce size and the number, type, and location of its facilities; and
• employer’s type of operations, including its workforce composition, structure, or functions and its geographic separateness from and administrative or fiscal relationship with the affected facility.

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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.