Court Opinion

ID: 9730387
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 15:11:00.055081+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:06.176128
License: Public Domain

SHIRLEY S. ABRAHAMSON, J.
(dissenting). An employer has the legal right to refuse to hire a person who cannot do the job. If Sharon Basile cannot perform the entry level job at AMC at the standards set by AMC, AMC can refuse to hire her, and she loses this lawsuit. The employer is thus fully protected under the Fair Employment Act. Sec. 111.32(5) (f), Stats. 1973.1
But Sharon Basile’s ability to do AMC’s job is not the issue at this stage of the case. The issue here is a legal issue of statutory interpretation — whether Sharon Basile is handicapped as that term is used in the Wisconsin Fair Employment Act.
AMC refused to hire Sharon Basile because AMC thought she was too small to be able to do the job. When Basile applied for a job at AMC, an AMC doctor gave her a ten-minute physical examination. It included grasping her arms and legs and examining her back. The doctor concluded from her outward appearance — her height, weight, and perceived lack of muscle development — that she would be unable to do the job. On the doctor’s recommendation, AMC refused to hire Basile.
By perceiving Basile’s stature as a disadvantage that would make achievement unusually difficult or as a physical disability that would limit her capacity to work,2 *720AMC made short stature a protected classification under the Act. At the time Basile applied for employment, there were no “standards set by the employer,” sec. 111.32(5) (f) ; AMC did not prescribe any height, weight, weightlifting, or reach requirements for applicants for the job nor did it test Basile’s abilities to lift weights or to reach or otherwise to perform the job. AMC simply assumed that she was “too small” to do the job and treated short stature as a handicap.
The 1973 Wisconsin Fair Employment Act — which is applicable in this case — does not define the term handicap. In essence the Act ensures that employers do' not apply unreasonable generalizations about people in the hiring process. The intent of the Act is to prohibit employers from prejudging an applicant’s qualifications on the basis of such matters as race, religion, gender, and handicap. Too often in our society a person of small stature is thought to have limited capacity to do physical work.3 The purpose of the Act is to require the employer to consider the ability of the individual applicant to do the job rather than to assume the inability of the individual applicant on the basis of the applicant’s physical condition. Under the Act the employer need hire only those persons who can do the job according to the employer’s standards.
In adopting the Fair Employment Act the legislature recognized that frequently it is society’s attitude toward a person’s physical condition, rather than the physical condition itself, that handicaps the person. Handicap is in the eyes of the beholder. As Jeff Erlanger, a quadriplegic since birth, wisely observed on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday, “A lot of our handicap comes from society.” Wis. State J., sec. 2, p. 1, May 26, 1984.
*721The legislature enacted the Fair Employment Act “to encourage and foster to the fullest extent practicable the employment of all properly qualified persons regardless of their age, race, creed, color, handicap, natural origin or ancestry.” Sec. 111.31(3), Stats. 1973. The legislature has instructed the court to adopt a broad, liberal interpretation of the Act to accomplish its purposes. Sec. 111.31(3), Stats. 1973. In deciding this case the court fails to heed the legislature’s instruction and subverts the legislative intent set forth in sec. 111.31, Stats. 1973. In addition, the majority’s attempt to explain and distinguish our own prior cases, including Dairy Equipment,4 is confused and confusing. Fortunately the majority opinion is limited to the facts of this case and the 1973 Act.
For the reasons set forth, I dissent.

 Sec. 111.32(5) (f), Stats. 1973, provides that “the prohibition against discrimination because of handicap does not apply to failure of an employer to employ or retain as an employee any person who because of a handicap is physically or otherwise unable to efficiently perform, at the standards set by the employer, the duties required in that job.”

 In Chicago, M., St. P. & P. R.R. Co. v. ILHR Dept., 62 Wis. 2d 392, 398, 215 N.W.2d 443 (1974), we said that a person is handicapped within the Act if she or he has a physical disadvantage, impairment, or disability “that makes achievement *720unusually difficult; esp.: a physical disability that limits capacity to work.” See also majority opinion at pp. 713-715.

 Society’s perception of short people is put to music in Randy Newman’s hit song “Short People.”

 In Dairy Equipment Co. v. ILHR Dept., 95 Wis. 2d 319, 328-31, 290 N.W.2d 330 (1980), we said that a person is handicapped within the Act if the employer perceives the person’s physical condition as making achievement unusually difficult or as limiting the person’s capacity to perform the job.