Hey etv78, do you just get up and quit whenever you run into something you don’t like? Fucking quitter.
Lynn, I’d NEVER ask someone to endanger their health to participitate in an activity.
BTW, Waffle-There are other boards I read here.
So would you ask someone who’s acrophobic to climb walls? Remember, a person might not want to admit that s/he’s got acrophobia. How about someone who just plain doesn’t get excited about climbing walls? Wall climbing appeals to some people, while others find it boring or even scary. Many people have limits as to what they can do, and some would prefer not to discuss these limits with some asshole who has come up with an exercise.
What the heck is wrong with handing out raises and bonuses? My husband regularly gets bonuses because he’s very good at what he does. I can TELL when he’s received a bonus, even if he’s saving it as a surprise, because it lifts his spirits.
A lot of these team building thingies are not optional, they’re mandatory, and yet most of them are at least boring and might even be dangerous to some workers. And, worst of all, they’re counterproductive. They only work in a positive way on a small percentage of the workers. The rest of the workers resent them, very much.
Hell, I love to play Dungeons & Dragons, and a good game can build an incredible esprit de corps among the players and DM, enabling the group to learn to work as a team. However, this game isn’t for everyone, and it would be a grave mistake to suggest that every workplace could benefit from having weekly gaming sessions. Now, for military leaders, yeah, it might be a great idea for them to play D&D (or its ancestor, Chainmail) on a regular basis…but even then, not all would look forward to it.
Workers have opinions and likes and dislikes. One person might regard a trip to a sushi bar as a treat, another as an exercise in trying to find something not totally disgusting to eat. And many workers have friends and family that they’d like to see when they’re not at work. Having an exercise over the weekend is a damn poor way to spend your kid’s first birthday, or his fifth (when he can remember it).
I’d NEVER schedule work related mandatory events outside work hours. I reiterate: unless you work for yourself, your boss owns your time 9AM-5PM, Monday-Friday.
Oh, is it hard to get a psychologist’s note attesting to psychological issues?
I have no idea whether it’s hard, or not.
What it would be is fucking goddamned brain-damaged stupid. You’re effectively telling your boss you’re suffering from some aspect of mental illness.
Whether it’s legal or not, just watch how soon that person gets shuffled out of work, through one excuse or another. 99% of the people in the US seem to believe that if you suffer from any degree of mental illness you’re just one bad word away from doing a workplace massacre.
IIRC people under psychological care arecover under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Meaning-you can’t be fired for your condition.
Yeah, good luck with that and any idea of career advancement.
Chimera-you can’t be denied promotions due to disability, either!
You’re not supposed to be able to fired directly for that. It still happens. And then proving that it was because of illegal discrimination because of mental illness is pretty difficult. In part because juries are made up of those 99% of the population that equate social anxiety disorders with out and out schizophrenia. And make no allowances between the differences someone whose symptoms are controlled, and who may be bare knuckling it.
Then if you’ve got a history of mental illness - you can never, ever lose your temper again. Because it becomes evidence for a justified firing: “Look, we’ve got these write ups for Joe being confrontational with his supervisor.” No matter that the extent of the event was Joe telling his supervisor, during his lunch hour: “For God’s sake, let me take a dump and then I’ll be able to talk with you about this!”
Which completely ignores the point Chimera makes.
Just because something’s illegal, doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
You can do that if you want to never get promoted again or even fired - I have less that zero trust in a company not using personal information against me (so I never tell them anything). On preview - what Otaku said. They can’t use things against you that they don’t know about.
My husband works with an employee-owned company - you know what REALLY makes him happy? Bonuses and dividends. What makes him unhappy is being forced to do anything on his personal time that he doesn’t want to do. He’s not keen on doing it during work hours, either.
The hell you can’t.
I’ve been fired for blowing the whistle on people violating company policy. I’ve been punished for pointing out that certain actions are illegal. I was once told, after a major back injury, that I would not be allowed to go to the Doctor anymore because I only worked 35 hours the week I had the MRI. Damn straight that is illegal. What did they do next? They made up some bullshit reason to give me a written warning, deny me a quarterly bonus and threaten to fire me. Companies can do just about any damned thing they want to do, regardless of legality, because you have almost zero chance of actually proving it in Court.
Right now, my Director chooses the people he’s going to promote and then moves them into the position without ever following company policy to interview for it. And every damned one of those people is in their early 20’s. No one older than that gets these promotions. About once a year the company decides they want him to hold interviews for open positions - ONLY once a year, and damn, what a shock, the people he’s already put in those positions get the jobs. None of them meet the paper requirements for the jobs, experience wise, but they meet his requirement of having good job numbers and being young and inexperienced enough to be easily intimidated by him.
I’ve seen more than one disabled person “counselled out”, or laterally transfered to a job that was then eliminated.
If your boss wants you gone, “legal” or “company policy” ain’t got shit to do with it.
Chimera-why haven’t you consulted a lawyer? This is clearly illegal!
The question is one of PROOF.
I’ve never run into you before this thread, but I gotta say, you come across as incredibly naive.
Lord-I started this thread. And my naivete may be because I have a VERY obvious disability.
Yup. Your disability is quite obvious from the OP.
Not only is documentation difficult to provide for such claims, have you considered the time frames involved with successfully pursuing such a suit? AIUI such suits often take years to go through the courts. Years in which the plaintiff, in this case Chimera, is obligated to maintain himself in spite of likely having been put on unpaid furlough (if not outright fired) while his claim is being tested in the courts. Which means that even with the ability to contract a lawyer for payment upon settlement it’s still a significant financial bite to simply even begin to bring such a suit to term.
In the meantime, trying to get a new position while one is furloughed from the old position is going to be difficult since one will now have a reputation for being a troublemaker. Similarly, even if someone does get a new position after filing an unlawful termination suit, that can end up hurting them at the trial, because now the guilty employer may be able to point to their new job as proof that any harm was mitigated by this new position.
In short, it takes time, money, determination, and luck to win an ADA suit. When one’s option is to gamble like that, or simply keep a steady paycheck coming in, a lot of people are going to swallow a lot of technically illegal bullshit, because the risks and costs associated with trying for justice are so high.
We’ve already got a team building exercise, it’s called ‘The Bar’ and we meet there Thursdays after work.
Dallas, why only Thursday? 
Agreed. Legally speaking, and in very general terms, the employer cannot be held responsible for infringing on an employee’s condition that they knew nothing about. The onus is on the employee to make the employer aware of a condition within the context of the employment relationship before it becomes a problem. As always, specific facts can affect matters; for accurate advice, consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.