Essential job requirements

All employees must be able to perform the tasks that are essential to the job. An employee who is not able to perform the ‘inherent’ or genuine and reasonable requirements of the job may be terminated lawfully.

It is very important to identify what are essential or inherent tasks. If there is a particular way of doing the job which you are not able to do, you should be allowed to carry out your duties in a different way if doing so will deliver the same outcome.

For example if an employee is required to use a computer to write correspondence, using the computer is an essential task, but using a keyboard is not. So a person who may not have the fine motor skills to use the keyboard can use a voice activated computer and still be able to write the required correspondence.

However if you are hired as a sales person and need to travel around country areas and demonstrate how to operate a machine, that travel is an inherent part of your job and, depending on circumstances, driving may be an essential requirement. If you lose or do not have a licence to drive because of a disability, then you are not able to perform an inherent requirement of the job

Case study 19 – Colour blindness did not mean inability to do the work

Crombie v Commonwealth of Australia, 1998, Australian Human Rights Commission

Facts: Alan Crombie, who had colour blindness, applied for a promotion at work. He failed the standard medical test for colour vision and therefore was not granted the promotion. The employer argued that the discrimination was not unlawful, because Mr Crombie was not able to meet the inherent requirements of the job.

Decision: The Commission found that some ability to differentiate colours was an inherent requirement of the job. However it found that the standard colour test might exclude too many people given the actual requirement. Evidence showed that Mr Crombie was able to differentiate colours well enough to fulfill the inherent requirements of the job. Passing the standard colour test was held not to be an inherent requirement of the job.

Essential job requirements

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