Ask a Manager: When is no accommodation is reasonable for a disability?

[minoanmiss]

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.)

Comments

[cereta]

Sorry, "same accommodation challenge with regard to art degrees." Our art degree, like most, requires a "Life Drawing" class (or it did ten years ago when I co-led a panel on academic freedom that touched on a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of these same topics, and my hand hurts like a mofo, so not looking it up right now), so a religious restriction that prevents the drawing of nude models was, again, ten years ago, a no-go for visual/drawing art degrees.

Interestingly, the topic of "alternative assignments" at that time was not so much (or perhaps not just) restrictions based on "academic freedom," which was itself mostly about accommodating/overriding "religious objections" to progressive content (having to read a story in which gay people exist, for example, and yes, that's snarky, because yes, I absolutely got that comment on my lit evals). It moved on to triggers, which never got resolved to my satisfaction (where I was actually the odd person out saying, "look, I can at least tell them there's a graphic rape scene," although I have since kind of waffled on telling them how to skip it, because if that works on a rape scene in The Gunslinger, it works a lot less well on the gay sex scene of "Brokeback Mountain," and I have come to share my colleagues' somewhat-cynical-but-sadly-accurate concern that students are more likely to ask to be allowed to "skip" the latter than the former). It was on disability accommodations when I arrived and is still on them today.

Christ, I'm wordy today. No pun intended.