Court Opinion

ID: 9558299
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:06:12.777923+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:08:40.645448
License: Public Domain

*1001BERZON, Circuit Judge,
with whom Circuit Judge REINHARDT joins, concurring in part, dissenting in part, and concurring in the judgment:
I would approach the “qualified individual” and Department of Transportation (DOT) hearing standard inquiries differently than does the majority, but do agree that this case must be remanded for reexamination under the majority’s statement of the business necessity framework. I therefore concur only in Parts I, II, III(A)-(C)(1), III(D), III(E), IV(B), and V of the majority opinion, and in the judgment.1
I.
The majority holds that to be “qualified individuals with disabilities” Oloyede and Habib (or some other member of the class) must show that they can “perform the essential job function of safely driving package cars.” Maj. Op. at 992. The majority opinion is entirely unclear, however, as to how they are to do so. In my view, such a requirement can be squared with the statute and with the complaint in this case, if at all, only if understood as imposing a definable, threshold burden.
1.
Oloyede and Habib ask in their complaint just that the district court order UPS to “individually assess ... hearing disabled workers to determine if they are able to safely drive vehicles where DOT regulations are not applicable.” In other words, although the plaintiffs certainly hope eventually to become package car drivers, they are not seeking to bypass UPS’s package car driver testing, training, and probation programs and be placed directly into the driver’s seat. The district court explicitly limited its relief to mandating individual assessment.
UPS’s requirements and programs are extensive. First, applicants must have adequate seniority and clean driving records to begin the application process. Then, in addition to the DOT physical, applicants must pass a driving test to enter the program. If they pass, they enter a driving training course with both on-the-road and classroom components. If they pass that course, they embark on a thirty-day probationary period, with supervisors sometimes riding along. Only if they pass all these hurdles do those who enter the program become UPS package car drivers.
The majority opinion would require the plaintiffs to bear the ultimate burden of proving that they will be safe package car drivers, so as to show that they are qualified persons with disabilities. But, perhaps because it does not recognize the limited nature of the relief sought, the majority leaves unclear what it is asking of the district court and of the parties on remand with regard to that requirement.
Requiring the plaintiffs to prove that they will be safe package car drivers, as the majority opinion does, will unnecessarily complicate this litigation on remand. “Safe” is not a self-defining term, and particularly is not so in the context of industrial safety decisions; nor is it self-evident whether any particular scheme for predicting whether a person who has never driven a package car safely will be able to do so is likely to yield valid results.2 Thus, asking *1002Oloyede and Habib to prove that they are “safe” without providing guidance as to how they are to do so, or as to how “safe” is “safe” in this context, presents the litigants and the district court with an ill-defined and complicated puzzle. Yet, such a requirement is extraneous given the limited nature of the relief Oloyede and Habib seek. UPS has designed evaluation methods using its own vehicles to test for the degree of safety it requires, so it makes little sense to suggest that Oloyede and Habib must devise, validate, and pass their own safety tests and training programs before they may sue to take UPS’s tests and training programs — which, again, is all that they seek to do.
Here, what makes sense is to require the plaintiffs to meet UPS’s threshold requirements for entry into the package car driver testing and training program. UPS itself will then be able individually to evaluate them for the job they desire, according to UPS’s own standards and methods (with appropriate accommodations, if requested and if the need for them is proven, see 42 U.S.C. § 12111(8)-(9) (defining “qualified individual” and “reasonable accommodation”); Dark v. Curry County, 451 F.3d 1078, 1088 (9th Cir.2006) (explaining the reasonable accommodation process)).3
Practically speaking, under the approach I suggest, once a deaf applicant shows that he meets the normal threshold qualifications for eligibility — that he is at least twenty-one years of age, possesses a valid driver’s license, and has a clean driving record by UPS’s local standards — he has met his burden of proof in this regard. It is then UPS’s burden to show, if it desires to adopt as a threshold requirement a minimum hearing level such as the DOT standard, that it can establish under the business necessity test that deaf applicants as a group who do not meet that requirement cannot drive package cars safely. Unless UPS can establish a business necessity supporting such a blanket require*1003ment, either by validating the application of the DOT standard to deaf drivers or by adopting some other validated standard for such drivers, it must allow hearing impaired applicants to take the same initial driving test, benefit from the same training program, and be subject to the same final test as all other applicants, all with reasonable accommodations if necessary.
This approach in no way compromises the safety of UPS’s driving force, as there are other stages, after applicants are deemed qualified to commence training, at which drivers, including deaf drivers who cannot safely drive package trucks, may be weeded out. If the final test, for example, shows that a deaf applicant is fully capable of driving safely, regardless of the extent of his hearing impairment, he should not be disqualified from employment. If, however, it reveals that an applicant’s hearing impairment results in an inability to avoid accidents to the same extent as drivers without hearing impairments, he should be deemed to have failed the test. The key, accordingly, is to design a training and testing program that will eliminate all applicants who pose a safety hazard regardless of whether the cause is hearing impairment, inadequate vision, lack of judgment, slow reflexes, lack of intelligence, or some disability other than a hearing impairment.
In this case, should the plaintiffs prevail and be allowed to undergo the training program, UPS would be free to design a test to be administered following its completion. By doing so, it would test the ability of all potential employees, including those who are hearing-impaired, to drive in a safe manner. Oloyede and Habib would be allowed, if they pass the initial driving test, to enroll in the training program and take the final test upon its completion. Those who fail the testing and training program for reasons related to their hearing impairment, would, of course, be entitled to challenge it on the ground that it did not properly measure whether such employees could perform the essential functions of the position. But, absent such a challenge, and absent UPS proof of the DOT standard or some other hearing impairment standard as a business necessity, plaintiffs and other deaf drivers would demonstrate that they are safe drivers in the same manner as all other employees who desire to be package car drivers.
As I read the district court’s opinion, it is consistent with this basic approach. I would not, therefore, vacate the district court’s holding on the “qualified individual” point.4
2.
The majority opinion holds, instead, that the district court erred by not specifically examining whether Oloyede and Habib are now capable of driving a package car safely, rather than just whether they can drive safely enough to be eligible for UPS’s package car driver assessment program. Maj. Op. at 993. Still, the majority opinion may not require significantly more proof of Oloyede and Habib than they have already adduced, except in one respect.
UPS does not decide whether participants in its training program can drive a package car safely enough to meet UPS’s risk standards until the end of the program. Instead, it uses the entry requirements and the initial phases of the training program — most notably, a driving test — to decide whether applicants are, at a first *1004cut, likely to be able to perform that essential job function and so should be allowed to continue training for the job. Surely, Oloyede and Habib, who have never driven package cars, are not required to show that they are more able to perform the essential job function of ultimately driving a package car safely than any other similarly inexperienced UPS employee who successfully passes the initial screening for the training program. Instead, they must simply be as qualified as hearing employees must be at that initial stage. The majority’s description of its required evidentiary showing suggests as much, as it would include meeting UPS’s entrance requirements and tests, including “having a clean driving record,” and “passing the driving test,” not more. Id.
So, on remand, the district court may approach the qualified individual inquiry under the majority opinion by deciding whether the plaintiffs can show that they are likely to be able to drive package cars as safely as other training program entrants. The district court, on remand, may rely upon the evidence already provided by Oloyede and Habib, or on any other evidence they may introduce. Also, the district court may order discovery on the UPS driving test given to program entrants to allow Oloyede or Habib (or some other class representative) to reconstruct and then take the same test. Members of the class who meet all valid requirements and can pass that test, with or without reasonable accommodations, would then be as qualified to be package car drivers as other employees entering the training program, and will meet their burden of proof in this litigation.
To require the plaintiffs to show any more to meet their burden of proof would be to suppose that UPS’s training program is a useless formality in no way essential to teaching strategies and skills necessary to drive package cars safely. UPS obviously does not believe that, and neither should we. As deaf potential drivers have not had the opportunity to learn those skills and strategies, they cannot fairly be measured for safety against drivers who have. And, there is no way potential deaf drivers can reproduce and prove that they can pass a several-week program supervised by experienced UPS trainers. So, as far as I can tell, deaf drivers should be able to show they can drive a package car safely and so are “qualified persons with a disability,” as the majority requires, simply by passing a driving test equivalent to the one UPS requires to enter its package car driver training program.
II.
The majority opinion is also somewhat unclear on how the district court should review the evidence supporting UPS’s business necessity defense of the DOT hearing standard. The majority remands on this question, directing the district court to give “some consideration” to the DOT’s use of the standard for larger vehicles as evidence for business necessity. Maj. Op. at 998.
It appears to me that the district court has largely already done so. It devoted several pages of careful analysis to explaining the empirical and statistical deficiencies inherent in extending the DOT hearing standard beyond the area in which it now applies. It examined the studies supporting such an extension, noting that the data supporting their conclusions is “extremely dated,” that the studies used different definitions and methodologies and so are not easily comparable, and that the studies do not, themselves, tie the DOT hearing standard to particular risk levels.
Nor do I think that Morton v. UPS, 272 F.3d 1249, 1264-65 (9th Cir.2005) directed *1005the district court simply to disregard the evidentiary weight of the DOT hearing standard, as the majority suggests. Morton held that the mere existence of the standard “cannot shoulder UPS’s statutory burden because the standard itself does not cover vehicles below its weight threshold.” Id. at 1264. Instead, Morton directed the district court to analyze the data supporting extending the DOT standard to non-DOT vehicles. Id. The district court in this case did exactly that. Its analysis led it to conclude that the extension of the DOT hearing standard was not supportable under the version of the business necessity defense set forth in Morton.
In any event, the majority does not disapprove of the district court’s factual findings on this point, and instead only remands to the district court for it to consider the question under the business necessity framework that the majority opinion today enunciates. That directive is perfectly proper, because it is possible — although, I suggest, not probable— that the analysis will come out differently under the business necessity standard as we enunciate it today. But nothing in the majority opinion prevents the district court from examining in that context the same methodological and empirical flaws it previously discussed.
Those flaws may well be significant under today’s standard. As the majority demonstrates, “business necessity” is not an easy hurdle for an employer to surmount, particularly when using discriminatory employment tests or qualification standards. As we have held in the Title VII context, “[a]s a general principle, the greater the test’s adverse impact [on protected individuals], the higher the correlation [between the qualification standard and the essential functions of the job] which will be required.” Clady v. County of Los Angeles, 770 F.2d 1421, 1432 (9th Cir.1985). Here, UPS’s use of the DOT hearing standard excludes, if not 100% of deaf individuals (as a few may pass), then at least the vast majority of such individuals. Under our law, such a facially-discriminatory qualification standard must be well-justified indeed. The district court’s initial analysis demonstrates the thinness of the data supporting UPS’s use of the DOT hearing standard. On remand, the district court will have to decide whether the business necessity framework, as described in the majority opinion, can tolerate such serious impacts justified with such scanty data.
Only if the district court decides that the DOT hearing standard is supported by business necessity could UPS use the hearing standard to exclude deaf individuals as a group. Any other result would leave in place the barriers, based in group stereotypes rather than in thoughtful individual consideration, that the ADA seeks to root out of American society.
*****
With these comments, I concur in Parts I, II, III(A)-(C)(1), III(D), III(E), IV(B), and V of the majority opinion, and in the judgment.

. To be clear: I do not concur in Parts 111(C)(2) and IV(A), and in any portion of the majority opinion that restates the holdings of those sections.

. Industrial "safety” is necessarily a relative concept. Companies such as UPS must accept that their operations can never be perfectly safe, and so must determine the level of risk they are willing to take. Deciding whether a given activity is sufficiently "safe” thus *1002requires balancing the acceptability (in both moral and financial terms) of a certain degree of risk against the costs of avoiding the risk and the company's human resources needs.

. I note that to recognize that Oloyede and Habib suffer a discriminatory wrong when they are rendered ineligible to compete for a driver job by being barred from becoming candidates for the job is consistent with anti-discrimination law generally. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 281 n. 14, 98 S.Ct. 2733, 57 L.Ed.2d 750 (1978), the Supreme Court rejected the notion that Bakke, who was challenging medical school admissions affirmative action policies that he contended discriminated against him, was required to “prove that he would have been admitted in the absence of the [policies]” to have standing to challenge them. Rather, "the University's decision not to permit Bakke to compete for all 100 places in his class, simply because of his race,” satisfied the injury requirement. Id.
Similarly, in Northeastern Florida Chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America v. Jacksonville, 508 U.S. 656, 664, 113 S.Ct. 2297, 124 L.Ed.2d 586 (1993), a contractor group could challenge a city’s affirmative action policy without having to show that "one or more of its members would have been awarded a contract but for the challenged ordinance.” Rather, the injury is "the denial of equal treatment resulting from the imposition of the barrier, not the ultimate inability to obtain the benefit.” Id. at 666, 113 S.Ct. 2297. "The injury in cases of this kind is that a 'discriminatory classification prevent[s] the plaintiff from competing on an equal footing.” Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena, 515 U.S. 200, 211, 115 S.Ct. 2097, 132 L.Ed.2d 158 (1995) (quoting Northeastern Florida, 508 U.S. at 667, 113 S.Ct. 2297) (alteration in original); see also Bras v. California Public Utility Comm’n, 59 F.3d 869, 873 (9th Cir.1995) (following this analysis). The injury suffered by Oloyede and Habib is manifestly of this type. It would be strange to construe the ADA as out of harmony with general antidiscrimination and equal protection law.

. The majority takes the same course while analyzing whether Oloyede is a "qualified individual” under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). Maj. Op. at 998-1000. I therefore also do not concur with that section of the opinion, for the same reasons given here with regard to the ADA.