What Def Leppard can teach us about the Americans with Disabilities Act

What Def Leppard can teach us about the Americans with Disabilities Act

You know who has a great ADA story? Def Leppard.

A bunch of Sheffield, England teenage friends form a band in the late 70s and bust their asses for years till their third album, Pyromania, finally catches fire in 1983. They’re on top of the music world (well, almost the top, they can’t quite unseat Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album from its #1 spot), they’ve worked hard to get here, and now they’re gonna enjoy the hell out of it!

And enjoy it they did, for about a year, until December 31, 1984, when 21-year-old drummer Rick Allen is in a serious car accident. He lives. But he loses his left arm.

He’s a drummer—he needs that arm. But fate doesn’t care; fate takes it anyway.

It would have been very easy for that to be the end of Rick Allen’s drummer story. I’d love to ask him about it someday, but I have to think he had thoughts of giving up countless times. How could he not have? (I’m a drummer; when I get a little owie on one of my fingers and can’t use one of my hands very well, it affects my drumming significantly.) But however many times quitting crossed his mind, persisting crossed it at least one time more, because the accident happened almost 30 years ago, and on July 21, 2022, I watched Rick Allen pummel and mesmerize 50,000 people in Denver, Colorado when Def Leppard played to a stadium full of fans.* Drummers need four limbs? That’s a matter of opinion.

Now, Def Leppard are British and therefore not subject to the ADA, and the ADA didn’t get passed till eight years after Rick Allen’s accident, but putting those details aside, I think this makes for a good ADA story.

What if Def Lep had been an ADA-covered company in America and Rick came to them about a year after losing his arm and said: “hey mates I’m ready to come back to work!”

I wouldn’t blame a single guy in the room if there were some raised eyebrows and confused sideways glances exchanged among his bandmates upon hearing this. How could they not have wondered to themselves: “How can he play drums with one arm? And how will keeping him as our drummer affect our band?”

The display of loyalty and friendship that happened next blows me away and literally brings me to tears as I write this. The band decided to stick together with Rick as their drummer.

Pause and let that sink in. A rock band in a genre that prided itself on instrumental technical mastery and bombastic drums—a band at the peak of their career (or so they thought; bigger things were soon to come), decided to carry on with a one-armed drummer.

This turned out to be not only a loyal and loving decision, but a wise and lucrative one. Their next album, Hysteria, outsold Pyromania, produced a ridiculous number of hit singles, including “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” and saw the band reach their peak popularity.

It’s a feel-good story.

Now, let’s get ADA about this.

Imagine you’re an employer in America today. One of your employees suffers a terrible accident and loses an arm. This employee had been in a job that is intensely physical, where he used both of his arms almost 100% of the time.

About a year after losing his arm, he comes to you and says he’s ready to return to his job.

You’ve never seen anyone do this job with anything less than two arms. It doesn’t seem possible. The employee acknowledges that he is unable to do the job currently but is seeking accommodations to enable him to do so.

What should your response be under the ADA?

Best answer: Call me.

Second best answer: Engage in the ADA’s “interactive process” to determine whether there is any accommodation that will enable this employee to perform the essential functions of his job, without creating an undue hardship on the company.

That last paragraph may sound simple, but it’s where I spend a huge percentage of my professional time talking to my clients. These are some of the toughest challenges employers face.

What if he asks you to design and build him a custom-made electronic machine that will enable him to do what he used to do with his arm, but now with his leg? Would this constitute an “undue hardship” under the ADA? Maybe, maybe not. That should be the subject of at least one, and probably many, good-faith conversations between you and your employee, where you’ll discuss things like the cost of the machine, how its physical presence in the workspace could affect productivity and safety, who will be responsible for maintaining the machine, what happens if the machine breaks in the middle of a shift, whether the machine will actually enable him to successfully do his job, etc.

I’m going to go out on a limb here (pun not intended but recognized) and say that in most situations like the one I just described, the typical American employer would not be required to design and build a custom-made machine, likely costing tens of thousands of dollars, for this employee. But it’s an intensely fact-specific analysis and the answer can be different in different workplaces and scenarios.

And if you as an employer decide that this request for a custom-made machine would create an undue hardship on the company and therefore you’re not willing to provide it, that should not be the end of the interactive process. You should explore other possible accommodations with the employee. You should spend some time with the Job Accommodation Network (JAN) (https://askjan.org) researching ways you might accommodate this employee’s disability. (I just entered “amputation” in JAN’s search bar and lots of great info came up.) You should ask this employee to get input from his medical provider on ideas for accommodations. And then, after you’ve considered every potential accommodation and determined that none of them are reasonable, you’re still left with the decision of whether to keep this employee in this job. If he can’t perform the essential functions of his job, you are not legally required to. If you decide to remove him from this job, you should do one last thing before terminating him—look around your company to see if there are any vacant positions that this employee is qualified for, and if there are, offer them to the employee. (They can be lower pay/status, although that should be avoided if possible.)

Back to Def Leppard. They apparently took a different approach. They just said “OK” to Rick Allen’s request, as crazy as it may have sounded at the time.

And we’re all better for it.

*That pic on the prior page shows me, two of my kids, and Def Lep guitarist Phil Collen on the streets of Denver the day before the show. Unfortunate day for the Motley Crue shirts.

These are my Modern Age Employment Law-branded drumsticks! They’re legit! Let me know if you want a pair!