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]

Okay, sorry, one last thought, that I think deserves its own comment despite being a "one vs all" situation:

I mentioned before that the religious objection I run into most often (being a writing and occasional lit teacher) involves homosexuality. Sometimes sex in general, and in one memorable evaluation, swearing, but both as a teacher and a program director, the complaint I dealt with most commonly was, "This work is about/contains LGBTQ+ people. Reading it violates my religious principles."

Now, I have had many responses to that, ranging from, "You do realize that the other novel we read contains about 30 murders, including the wholesale slaughter of a small town?" to "The list of works we would be reading was made available several days before the course began. There was time for you to drop for a refund or another course." But I'm genuinely curious: how would you recommend handling a situation like that? I'm not being facetious or setting you up for another doctoral dissertation. I just really want to know: what sort of accommodation, if any, should be made for that student?