Kingdom of the one-eyed: ADA advocates show a blind spot on safety.

• Author: Olson, Walter

Our topic this month is the interestingly favorable legal status these days of the one-eyed - or, as it's more polite to call them, persons with monocular vision. For readers who came in late, the Clinton administration caused a stir last year when it filed suit against United Parcel Service, challenging the company's policy of insisting that drivers of its delivery trucks have sight in both eyes.

That's unlawful discrimination against the visually disabled, said the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and it doesn't matter in the least that UPS's policy is based on concern for the safety of other road users rather than on any sort of malice or animus toward persons destitute of the usual ocular endowments. Nor does it matter that if a pedestrian happens to dart unexpectedly onto the roadway from the impaired side of one of its newly hired drivers, UPS stands to get sued for a fortune.

After sifting through the cases, I can report that the complaint against UPS by no means represents a novel or unprecedented interpretation of the law. There's now a whole jurisprudence on employers' obligation to turn a blind eye, so to speak, to safety worries when the Hathaway Man shows up in quest of a hazardous-duty assignment:

* The Supreme Court declined in January to review an Americans with Disabilities Act award against the city of Omaha for refusing to rehire a former policeman who'd lost sight in one eye and was suffering loss of peripheral vision in the other; the police chief believed those eyesight problems would interfere substantially with the policeman's duties. Estimated payout by the city: $200,000.

* The U.S. Department of Justice extracted a $110,000 settlement from the city of Pontiac, Michigan, which had withdrawn a job offer to a firefighter after a pre-employment physical revealed he could see out of only one eye. Firefighters, like police officers, must be prepared for emergency situations in which visibility conditions may be poor even for those with unimpaired eyesight, and where accuracy in spotting dangers or aiming back at them can spell the difference between life and death.

* Also in Michigan, the state Supreme Court confirmed that under state disabledrights law, the Clawson Tank Co. could not exclude from a hazardous job a worker who'd lost an eye in an off-the-job incident. The company had noted that a significant share of injuries in its line of work were injuries to the eye, which were serious enough when they...