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agonyaunt2021-11-05 11:03 am
minoanmiss) wrote in agonyaunt2021-11-05 11:03 am
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Ask a Manager: When is no accommodation is reasonable for a disability?
When is no accommodation is reasonable for a disability?
I’m curious when it is acceptable to say no accommodation is reasonable and an applicant can be rejected because they can’t do the job due to their disability. I’m not asking for ways to get around reasonable accommodations. I’m looking for input on situations where a person truly cannot be accommodated.
A few examples, all of which are real examples I may run into: (1) Can a warehouse job that requires driving a forklift, moving around heavy boxes, placing them in shelves that are eight stories tall, and picking things off the shelves exclude people who are blind? In a wheelchair? I can’t see how these can be accommodated in this situation. (2) Can a retail job that requires replenishing inventory from the back room to the sales floor accommodate a blind applicant? Wheelchair? If it requires color coordinating the stock, can someone who’s colorblind be accommodated? (3) What about a home design company that requires knowledgeable color coordination and working with pictures provided from the client, and likely design software that requires visually laying out options? Perhaps there are reasonable accommodations I’m not seeing?
I can’t speak to what specific accommodations might be available in those situations since I don’t know all the adaptive technology that might be possible, but the Job Accommodation Network is a wealth of suggestions for accommodations for different disabilities. However, what the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits is discriminating against workers who can perform the essential functions of the job with or without reasonable accommodations — so if there’s not a reasonable accommodation that will allow the person to perform the work, the law doesn’t require an employer to hire them anyway. So the law wouldn’t require you to hire, say, a blind applicant to drive a bus. (The law also has an exception for accommodations that would pose “undue hardship” to the employers, which is usually — although not always — about cost.)
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It went fine for us until we had an interviewee cock their head and answer, "I dunno, what's a reasonable accommodation for this job?" and we had no idea what to answer.
In this particular situation, we would probably have had to remove certain job duties for this person. Which probably would have worked fine, we could have just shifted things around. But in order to figure that out we would have had to know details of their capabilities, which we weren't supposed to ask about in the interview. And as the interviewer I was not empowered to make decisions about job duties, and also had no idea what I was supposed to, or allowed to, say in the interview other than the required question. They decided to withdraw on their own - which I hope wasn't down to our reaction, but I don't know. If they hadn't we would have had to go to the manager, who would probably have gone to HR, who would probably have kicked it right back to us because they are terrible with questions like that.
I suspect the closest to a universal answer is that if there is no way for them to do the job as stated in the job description without fundamentally changing the nature of the job, then from a legal standpoint you can say there is no reasonable accommodation. But nearly all job descriptions at my level include "other duties as assigned" so that's useless, and there are a lot of people working here who are excused from certain duties for disability reasons. So it actually comes down to, is there an accommodation the applicant is willing to self-advocate for and/or that the employer is willing to offer, 'reasonable' or not?
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the thing is, there are often a lot more possibilities than people who don't have the disability realize. I remember reading a discussion of whether Deaf people can be EMTs -- the EMT who was asked at first thought, "no way" but asked a friend who told them about a Deaf EMT the friend worked with, who sensed vibration instead of sound when using a stethoscope. It turned out there's an organization for Deaf EMTs.
(Also it sounds like they threw you in the deep end with responsibility but no power. That sounds extremely annoying.)
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It is! But it's also not that uncommon for the person interviewing to not really have the training and/or power to know what to do here.
I think the point of asking the required question is that someone like the EMT will answer "yes", because they know they can do the job with reasonable accommodation, and then you're done, no more questions needed. And that works well a lot of the time!
Especially for jobs where the person is coming in with a fair amount of training/certification or experience, and presumably does have a pretty good understanding of what's required and how they can do it. If the applicant says yes, I can do the job with reasonable accommodations, this question shouldn't really come up for most people - and in that situation, the applicant has enough on the line that they are probably not going to say "yes" if they know they can't do the job. And if they're someone who has a lot of training, experience, and reputation, but isn't sure about accommodation because the disability is new, they would likely at least have a good understanding of job requirements, and the employer would likely have more motivation to accommodate them whether reasonable or not.
But the jobs I was dealing with were very part-time, non-career jobs that didn't really ask for any particular qualifications other than ability to do the job. And I've noticed that Alison tends to treat all hiring/job-hunting related questions as if it's for white-collar or other specialized jobs where people are building careers; often it's a very different situation for, like, part-time warehouse workers or a sales clerk at the mall. It sounds like LW is probably hiring more for those kinds of jobs, given the examples. Someone applying to be part-time night stocker at the Stop n' Shop as their first position since they became disabled probably doesn't have a particularly good understanding of what accommodations they will need or what the store can be expected to provide.
So I guess the question under this question is: to what extent is it the employer's responsibility to figure this out if the applicants don't know? Is it the applicant's job to come in knowing exactly what accommodations they need and if they're reasonable? If the applicant says, "I could do the job with these alterations, is that reasonable?" or "this is what I can do, could that be accommodated?", what next?
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https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reasonable-accommodation-and-undue-hardship-under-ada
https://askjan.org/a-to-z.cfm
https://odr.dc.gov/book/manual-accommodating-employees-disabilities/types-reasonable-accommodation
https://askearn.org/page/reasonable-accommodations
One of the reasons I was doubtful about this question is that it started out at the position that accomodations are/can be impossible. I think starting out at "this will be impossible unless proven otherwise" will end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know?
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I mean obviously you can't be a programmer who is physically unable to type...
...is a comment I've had to respond to so many times in the last 20 years.