But discrimination may be difficult to prove, and not all illnesses qualify as disabilities under the law. More and more employers have information about their employees' health, and more and more of them use it in personnel decisions. In part, workers are victims of their own success. Union drives during the 1960s led to the creation of employee assistance plans with on-site clinics and nurses. Around the same time, companies were given tax and regulatory incentives to run their own insurance programs, a process that accelerated during the 1980s as health insurance costs skyrocketed.
Some companies have fire walls to keep employees' medical records away from their supervisors.
David F. Linowes, a University of Illinois public policy professor who has been studying workplace privacy since the early 1970s, says that in his 1996 survey of Fortune 500 companies, a third of the 84 respondents said they used medical records to make employment-related decisions. It's something that enters the equation concerning their investment in personnel. I n a complaint filed in D.C. Superior Court last fall, a cancer patient named Patricia Scott charges that her former employer, the Service Employees International Union, did just that. She says the union canceled her health insurance and eventually dismissed her because it had changed to a self-insured health plan and didn't want to cover her expenses. The union denies the charge, saying it was dissatisfied with Scott's job performance and that she refused to provide adequate medical proof of her disability.