Did I say they were faking their disability OR did I say they choose to be a slapdick at work since they feel protected from any consequence for anything they do because of their (real) disability? Looks like you went to the ASL2.0 School of Reading for Comprehension.
Again, if you think that nobody ever fakes a disability, you don’t live in the real world.
This isn’t an all-or-nothing situation. It’s not that everyone who claims a disability truly has one, or all disabilities are faked. There are people who have a disability and require an accommodation, and there are people who fake or exaggerate a disability to scam the system.
I have injured myself at work almost 30 years ago and to this day it causes me problems. Fortunately, not as often as it used to, but there are days when I can’t use my dominant hand. It is awful.
Part of my regular job is providing accommodations for people that need them. I am very happy to do so. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to know that what I do can really help people. It makes me enjoy my job more.
I have coworkers who are fraud investigators and specifically investigate people who fake disabilities to get accommodations, or money, or something else. It’s a real thing and it’s a problem. A person will fall, and have a real back injury, and then claim they can’t work. And that might be true until they recover. But they like not having to work, so they will hobble into the doctor on a cane and act hurt, and then later be seen hauling 50 pound bags of mulch out of the back of a pickup truck.
It can be true that we need to be understanding of people with special needs and not marginalize them, and also be true that some people will try to take advantage of that and use it for their personal gain outside of what they actually need.
I’ve heard this sort of thing, and I don’t see why that means that they can’t claim disability.
Being able to take a couple 50 pound bags of mulch out of a pickup truck doesn’t mean that person can do that task all day, or even on most days. I’ve never asked for or filed for any form of disability, but there are some days when my back tells me that I can do yardwork, and some days when it tells me “Hell No!.”
I’m going to start off by saying that it’s been my experience most employees requesting an accommodation due to a disability are legitmate. i.e. They have a disability and they genuinely want an accommodation that will allow them to continue working.
There are a few people who abuse the system, and we deal with them by making it clear that even with an accommodation they’re required to perform the essential functions of their job. If they cannot perform the essential functions of their job even with a reasonable accommodation, then we can terminate employment.
The keyword here is reasonable. With so many different jobs and work environments, it’s difficult to issue a blanket statement about what constitutes reasonable so you have to look at it on a case-by-case basis. In my work environment, there are some positions where allowing someone to show up to work three hours late and work three hours later is pretty reasonable. There are other positions where we would not be able to accommodate that so easily.
A few years back, I had one employee who was extremely obese (500+ pounds) who had an accommodation to work from home. However, she felt like she was missing out by not being in the office and wanted to come in at least twice a week. The accommodation she asked for included the following.
- A place to park close to the front door and someone to help her in and out of her vehicle.
- To be able to come into work two days a week.
- To be able to go home at any point during the day because she’s fatigued.
We diagreed that these were reasonale accommodations and she ended up quitting a few weeks later. (There were no parking spaces close to the front door and she expected to miss work if she had to go home due to fatigue.)
I got an excited call from the supervisor of an employee who decided to bring her dog into work that day. I can’t remember the breed, but it was somewhere around 50 pounds and claimed it was her emotional support animal. I sent both her and the dog home and told her how to complete an accommodation request. She ended up quitting not too long after that. We wouldn’t have given an accommodation for an emotional support animal but we do for service animals of course.
@Atamasama might be referring to this Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/8jrxj7/why_you_shouldnt_brag_about_your_illegal/
I waited for a day when he had his new work truck and trailer, with his name and number on the door, and I made a video of him working on his yard and carrying 50 bags of mulch and climbing ladders. I sent videos and pictures to the fraud department of the workers comp office. Today I just found out that he was found guilty of fraud, ordered to pay back every dollar, and may end up in jail.
I wonder how many people with obvious disabilities are discriminated against because employers are afraid they’ll be saddled with a terrible employee they can’t fire. ADA laws are designed to protect people from discrimination because they have a disability, they’re not put in place to protect a bad employee. Your HR department really needs to brush up on the applicable employment laws and company policies. Having an employee who is dead weight is a morale killer and just bad for everyone at the company.
When their disability claim is based on the inability to walk or lift anything, it’s fraud.
That’s called being able to work with accommodations. But people often don’t want to work at all, or (more often) they do have a job but also claim they can’t work and collect disability insurance on top of their job pay. We have people who fake an injury to a doctor who then signs off on it, because as far as the doctor can tell the person is in legitimate pain and has limited mobility and strength.
I’m actually referring to surveillance video I’ve helped coworkers retrieve and edit. Some of the people I support are fraud investigators.
Though the Reddit post fits in with what happens at my work, yes. And people are rarely prosecuted, most often they are just ordered to pay back the benefits they fraudulently claimed.
It’s “essential functions” of the job. So if you’re a delivery driver, and you go blind, there’s no reasonable accommodation that can be made that will allow you to perform the essential functions of the job. I did read a case study from the EEOC of a counselor who was wrongfully terminated because they were unable to drive. The counselors at this facility would drive patients places from time-to-time, but it was trivially easy to get someone else to drive. And, again, his person was a counselor and driving was not an essential function of the job.
The HR person literally told me on the phone: “We can’t fire him, he is disabled and is protected.”
I had no idea he was disabled; this was the first I had heard. But it really didn’t matter. I have no problem with hiring someone with a disability, but this person could not do anything. I tried, and tried, and tried, and tried to assist him, but nothing work. I even gave him three weeks to complete an assignment that would normally take someone half a day to do, and he couldn’t do it.
I have no idea how he made it through engineering school. I am guessing he was heavily “accommodated” due to his disability. I know someone else who graduated from the same college, and she said some students were allowed to have virtually unlimited time to take exams, and some were allowed to have a tutor by their side as they took exams. If this is true, then IMO were are doing a disservice to these students, and setting them up for eventual failure in the work world.
I really thought this thread was about people who ARE disabled, genuinely, without question, but who use their disability to avoid consequences for actions unrelated to the disability.
A critical read of the OP’s four examples:
-
“Anxiety issues” is three hours late every day.
Clinical anxiety can certainly make it hard to leave the house, and I suspect that being late is a reasonable accommodation. But how late? It’s possible that the accommodation doesn’t specify, and they’re taking advantage. It’s also possible that they work three hours into the evening to compensate. So they might be taking advantage, and they might not: hard to say from this level of detail. -
“ADD” doesn’t attend in-person meetings: that issue seems directly related. It is annoying to have a Zoom component to an in-person meeting, but it’s also a reasonable accommodation.
-
“PTSD at work” doesn’t do their job and threatens people. Neither of those could be accommodations: this is clearly an issue regardless of the disability, though possibly related to it. But other people aren’t responsible for managing that person’s illness.
All three of these share the false belief that a disability protects them from being fired. In academia, tenured faculty often have this belief, too. There’s nobody who can’t be fired, just people whose firing requires so much documentation that managers are scared off from doing so.
- “PTSD at school” doesn’t take the test and isn’t registered for accommodations: this seems like a case where the accommodations would probably have let them flake on the test and re-sit it later, even if they showed up for the first ten minutes, but an instructor shouldn’t be making ad hoc accommodations. In this case, I think the instructor should have insisted that the student register with the Disabled Student Center, and once that process had begun, let them re-sit the exam. This is because, in an educational instition, the instructor is at least partly responsible for managing the student’s illness, at least as far as making sure they’re under professional care. But then, I usually give students a mulligan if they can show me they’ve jumped through the appropriate hoops to solve the problem.
Well, that was the intention.
This was very much my experience as well. Thank you for sharing.
They put up with this for NINE YEARS? Was she the CEO’s daughter, or what?
I think my experience with being disabled makes me very sensitive to bias. Some of this stuff about faking it reminds me very much of people who talk about fake rape accusations as if they are disqualifying of every rape survivor’s experience - they all might be lying! Some people lie! It diminishes the real struggles that disabled people go through, it makes it harder for people to ask for help, and it reinforces societal beliefs that being disabled is a cop out. If you get accommodations then you must be gaming the system.
The other thing that really chaps my hide is this idea that being disabled gets people privileges. I assure you there’s nothing at all in our society that privileges the disabled.
If the discussion was framed differently, then I would be there for it. This is a rant and it asked other posts to join in. Fuck that noise.
Interesting considering the discussion was NOT framed as
People are faking disabilities
Disabled are getting privileges (other than the ones they give themselves).
Several of us have to explained to you how your remarks are harmful. You won’t consider or accept the input.
Do you have direct knowledge of any of this, or was this for illustrative purposes only? The only thing that isn’t hypothetical seems to be your student.
Because they (you included) are at best mischaracterizing what I said and at worst strawmanning my examples.
It was probably going on for longer - my predecessors were lazy and didn’t want to do the work involved with disciplining a unionized government worker. Which can be done and I started the process - but she was still there when I retired.* Although she managed to start coming in closer to on time once I started docking her for being late and giving her unsatisfactory evaluations because her latenesses and absences kept her from doing her job in a minimally acceptable manner.
- And why she didn’t just retire I will never know - she was 15 years past being eligible to collect her pension.
In the category of “real disability, trying to take advantage”, i once had an employee who broke his foot. His doctor said he couldn’t take the subway to work. He hoped to get a few weeks of disability.
This was a desk job. Today it would be easy to do from home, but back then we had desktop computers hard wired into the company network.
We asked his doctor if he could work of we hired a car service to pick him up and take him home every day. His doctor said, “yes”. So he couldn’t go on disability, and had to work while his foot healed. He was pretty disappointed. He was quite open to me about his disappointment.
But he did come in, and did do his job.
This woman sounded like a walking lawsuit! Potential age discrimination, among other things. Ugh.