4 ms·

This falls apart the second you realize it's trivial to find a doctor who will say or do literally whatever you want if you pay the right amount.

by benced 2y ago

no_wizard 2y ago
Actual instances of disability accommodation at work being abused aren't exactly rampant. Part of which is that people face lots of stigma around disabilities still, but also the need to have some historical and diagnoses paperwork is a barrier that I suspect lots of people don't want to go through. Frankly, I don't believe its rampant to begin with, and I can't find any real evidence that supports that people are widely abusing these accommodation requests.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The jackasses that bring their "support dog" shopping with them are pretty rampant. People abuse the fuck out of the support dog program. I even know two people with "support dogs" who straight up admit they did it because they want to take their dogs out with them.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    Therefore, accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are also rampantly abused, even without any evidence to support this? I am suppose to believe that because you perceive society at large is abusing the situation around emotional support animals that this must also mean its rampant in the workplace? Again, without any evidence that accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are an issue of this magnitude? Even though the bar for getting them is far higher than what it takes to claim you have an emotional support animal when out shopping?[0] [0]: Stores have little incentive, and actually several disincentives, to ask for information about an emotional support animal. They actually can inquire if your animal is a service animal, and what tasks it has been trained to perform but they simply don't do the follow on. There's no incentive for them to do it. Not the case with workplace accommodations.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them. It's extremely naive and childish to still cling to the view that people are by and large honest when there are little or no repercussions for acting dishonestly. We could look at medical marijuana as a case study too. As soon as it became available as a medicine, a whole industry to get people prescriptions popped up over night. You just had to make an appointment with a special doctor, check a box saying you were sad, and just like that you could be "disabled". I would be impressed if you could look at me with a straight face and say "A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
      - no_wizard 2y ago
        >"A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused" Lets get this off the table now. I didn't propose one, I'm not saying one exists, and that would be a shitty law because there are better ways to go about this anyway. However, there are multiple instances where there are medically valid reasons where working from home is an appropriate accommodation for people. That is different from what you're saying. Extremely different. Disability should never be accommodated based on blanket actions, each situation tends to be unique to a person, and so is the accommodation requested have you ever had to disclose a complex disability to an employee and seek ongoing accommodations for it? >People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them. Never argued they won't, but unlike medical marijuana and a host of other examples, there is strikingly no person actually coming forward with any evidence that people are rampantly abusing disability accommodations in the work place. These laws already exist, and they already have decades worth of guidelines and such to go off of. I simply don't believe its a widely abused system. Its not a simple nor as private as doing any of the myriad of things people keep giving examples of. You have to disclose it at your place of work, which means HR and your manager at a minimum will be aware of it, and on top of that, there is a long stigma of people with disabilities being discriminated against in the workplace, so its not exactly behooving of your career goals to do this either. If anyone could reasonably come forward and show that there is actually more than hand wavy fears about people abusing laws around requiring disability accommodations in the work place to such a degree one could reasonably say its rampant, I'm all ears. I can't find anything about that, I haven't observed that. But i sure have observed a bunch of people who most likely do not have disabilities try and tell me, a person who absolutely has to do the thing of disclosing a disability in the workplace for proper accommodations, that I need to go through even more hoops and checks because I might be somehow taking advantage of the system. That I see alot. At the end of the day, what if people were? Why does it matter? Can someone show me why defaulting to making the workplace more disability friendly is actually a problem? The nerve of this community
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Shopping? I've literally watched "emotional support" dogs sitting on the tables at restaurants eating from their owners plates. I would have to think food code trumps disability accommodation, especially since the law isn't "you have to let them do whatever the fuck they like" but "provide reasonable accommodations".
- rincebrain 2y ago
  My personal experience in the two years or so has lead me to conclude that a lot of employers have started wanting medical paperwork for much more inane cases than they historically did, and in response, a lot of medical providers have started saying "no" to such requests, since they (pretty reasonably, to me) don't want to be in the business of saying "yeah they were sneezing for 3 days maybe don't make them come in", or such inane things. Of course, this screws over people with problems who could get such paperwork before but didn't need to, as well as people who existed in the gap where they didn't need that before so now if they try to report it, they're going to get questions about "why don't you have a paper trail of this?", as well as "you didn't seem sick". Because, shockingly, if you tell people, directly or indirectly, that you prefer the people who don't have an illness, they will learn to cover it up real well, or they get fired or quit when everyone but them gets promoted.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    I have a disability that has to be accommodated. It is very legitimate, but it is not exactly 'easy to see'. I have mountains of paperwork I submit at this point, because over time I have noticed a simple 1 page medical explanation was starting to get rejected, so I'd have to go back and forth getting more and more. Now I'm at the point where I am submitting 25 pieces of discrete information, from multiple professionals. Frankly, it feels humiliating but I would negatively affect my life I didn't go through the rigamarole. Then there's the whole 'is this influencing whether I get promoted or not' questions and such. When WFH became common place, it became so much easier for me to exist as a human being with some dignity left on the table, but alas, who cares about that, god forbid we give that any credence in the modern work place. There's already a huge body of work about how people with disability face discrimination in multiple aspects of our lives, including work, yet the culture still thinks people want to declare these with HR because it makes their life easier? Oh it sure doesn't.
    - rincebrain 2y ago
      People are bad at modeling behavior they're unfamiliar with. People who have never had any problems with executive dysfunction think you just don't want to if you say you're having trouble doing XYZ and you don't have some visible injury because for them, there's never been any disconnect between "deciding to do it" and "doing it", so they think you're making shit up. People who have never had significant physical impediments can't imagine "just push through it" being a thing that you're doing constantly so pushing further is going to fuck you up for a week or two, and so on.
- quickthrowman 2y ago
  > Actual instances of disability accommodation being abused aren't exactly rampant. Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding. Also, security blanket animals, I forgot the actual term they use but that’s what they are.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    >Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding. I fly very often, and my company has on many an occasion forced me to use Southwest Airlines. I have taken far more flights where there was there wasn't anyone flying in a wheel chair to begin with, than ones where this is even a possibility. Again, the people that are the loudest here are the people worried about it happening and perhaps some folks on social media platforms posting about doing it, but the inverse evidence that its a real, rampant issue is lacking, even anecdotally its inconsistent.
    - LtWorf 2y ago
      I'm disabled and I've done it many times (though never in USA). It's probably bullshit. Thing is that you might be able to walk but not able to do the distances in an airport, and sometimes in airports they just sit you in a wheelchair for their own convenience, because they have 10000 other people to take care of. There's degrees of disability. Someone might be able to do a few steps, that doesn't mean they're 100% fine. quickthrowman is just finding excuses to get outraged hating at disabled people.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Emotional support animals, which are not a concept recognized by the ADA.
- gotoeleven 2y ago
  Peer comment mentions the ridiculous "emotional support dogs" situation. Another example is the ridiculous abuse of ADD diagnoses to get extra time on tests. Oh and CA just had to roll back and fire, respectively, the soft on crime laws (prop 14) and public officials (oakland mayor, los angeles DA) because, surprise surprise, they lead to way more crime. People respond to incentives even if you don't think they do. Lots of people who work from home don't do much work.
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    All of these examples have nothing to do with disability accommodations at work. Lots of people in offices don't do much work too. I mean, that was true before people worked from home. Can you actually cite any statistics that prove this is a widespread, pervasive issue? Anecdotal evidence only seems to serve proof that you're annoyed at a bunch of things people do in society and somehow that means accommodations in the workplace for people with disabilities must also have the same perceived issues.
- tarlinian 2y ago
  I like how you edited this to add "at work" after folks provided examples of it happening outside of work. If you'd like a slightly more work adjacent example, see the rampant increase in IEPs for students in the bay area. (I'm sure that the increased time for tests provided in many of these cases is not being abused at all...)
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    Contextually, it was always about being at work. The entire conversation I have focused on work accommodations. I suppose I thought it was clear. The bar for getting an accommodation at work has been higher than many other places (like bringing an emotional support animal to a store). I can't speak to schools, that is also another very delicate social dynamic that has different incentives on how to handle these things than a place of business does.
olyjohn 2y ago
That's bullshit and just shows you have no clue what you're talking about. Regular people who don't live in some rich people's bubble can't even get a PCP without waiting weeks or months. And fuck off if you need to see a specialist with anything, there's another 3 months. Not to mention mental health specialists won't write you shit if you don't have an established relationship with them.
- benced 2y ago
  Even accepting your claims about medical access at face value - which I don't, they're ridiculous (even if you believe, as I do, the American medical system is bad) - the existence of a substantive population that has the means to exploit a system means that the system has to defend against them. Same concept as folks cheating on a test, people committing return fraud etc. The most anti-social people ruin it for everyone.
rincebrain 2y ago
I don't think it does, actually. Let's say, hypothetically, that someone gets this benefit who has no health condition that anyone will admit exists without being paid a bribe. Are you arguing that you're taking something from the company by them allowing this? You rapidly run into a similar problem to one many means-testing programs for benefits in the US do - it becomes far more expensive to do the testing than it would to just give people the benefit if they ask for it, even if many more people asked for it. And if some core job requirement makes WFH an actual nonstarter (e.g. if you're being paid to move packages in a warehouse, you generally can't do that from your bed), then it doesn't matter if your doctor says you can't do it, they can still fire you for not meeting a core requirement of your job that they can't just work around.
- benced 2y ago
  If you think work from office is more productive, then yes, they are taking something from the company and their coworkers who can't learn from them. If you feel that WFH has no productivity impact, then fair enough that you see any coercion as an unwarranted risk.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    Even if we say yes, WFO is more productive, for the purposes of this argument, unless this also shields you from being fired for not doing enough if you are less productive at home, that seems like it falls into the normal range of variation of productivity? Or, put differently, what's stopping someone from delivering WFH levels of productivity in the office, in this framing? If it's that they'd be punished for being unproductive, what's stopping that in the WFH parallel?
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      Receiving an accommodation definitely shields you from being fired for underperformance if the accommodation itself is what's preventing you from performing. If a datacenter employee receives desk work as an accommodation for mobility issues, the company can't turn around and fire them for not performing enough maintenance tasks from their desk.

This falls apart the second you realize it's trivial to find a doctor who will say or do literally whatever you want if you pay the right amount.

by benced 2y ago

This falls apart the second you realize it's trivial to find a doctor who will say or do literally whatever you want if you pay the right amount.

no_wizard 2y ago

Actual instances of disability accommodation at work being abused aren't exactly rampant. Part of which is that people face lots of stigma around disabilities still, but also the need to have some historical and diagnoses paperwork is a barrier that I suspect lots of people don't want to go through. Frankly, I don't believe its rampant to begin with, and I can't find any real evidence that supports that people are widely abusing these accommodation requests.

Workaccount2 2y ago
The jackasses that bring their "support dog" shopping with them are pretty rampant. People abuse the fuck out of the support dog program. I even know two people with "support dogs" who straight up admit they did it because they want to take their dogs out with them.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Therefore, accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are also rampantly abused, even without any evidence to support this? I am suppose to believe that because you perceive society at large is abusing the situation around emotional support animals that this must also mean its rampant in the workplace? Again, without any evidence that accommodations for disabilities in the workplace are an issue of this magnitude? Even though the bar for getting them is far higher than what it takes to claim you have an emotional support animal when out shopping?[0] [0]: Stores have little incentive, and actually several disincentives, to ask for information about an emotional support animal. They actually can inquire if your animal is a service animal, and what tasks it has been trained to perform but they simply don't do the follow on. There's no incentive for them to do it. Not the case with workplace accommodations.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them. It's extremely naive and childish to still cling to the view that people are by and large honest when there are little or no repercussions for acting dishonestly. We could look at medical marijuana as a case study too. As soon as it became available as a medicine, a whole industry to get people prescriptions popped up over night. You just had to make an appointment with a special doctor, check a box saying you were sad, and just like that you could be "disabled". I would be impressed if you could look at me with a straight face and say "A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused"
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      >"A law mandating people who feel stressed in the workplace need to unquestionably be given WFH rights would not be abused" Lets get this off the table now. I didn't propose one, I'm not saying one exists, and that would be a shitty law because there are better ways to go about this anyway. However, there are multiple instances where there are medically valid reasons where working from home is an appropriate accommodation for people. That is different from what you're saying. Extremely different. Disability should never be accommodated based on blanket actions, each situation tends to be unique to a person, and so is the accommodation requested have you ever had to disclose a complex disability to an employee and seek ongoing accommodations for it? >People will abuse protections meant to help others in need if it also benefits them. Never argued they won't, but unlike medical marijuana and a host of other examples, there is strikingly no person actually coming forward with any evidence that people are rampantly abusing disability accommodations in the work place. These laws already exist, and they already have decades worth of guidelines and such to go off of. I simply don't believe its a widely abused system. Its not a simple nor as private as doing any of the myriad of things people keep giving examples of. You have to disclose it at your place of work, which means HR and your manager at a minimum will be aware of it, and on top of that, there is a long stigma of people with disabilities being discriminated against in the workplace, so its not exactly behooving of your career goals to do this either. If anyone could reasonably come forward and show that there is actually more than hand wavy fears about people abusing laws around requiring disability accommodations in the work place to such a degree one could reasonably say its rampant, I'm all ears. I can't find anything about that, I haven't observed that. But i sure have observed a bunch of people who most likely do not have disabilities try and tell me, a person who absolutely has to do the thing of disclosing a disability in the workplace for proper accommodations, that I need to go through even more hoops and checks because I might be somehow taking advantage of the system. That I see alot. At the end of the day, what if people were? Why does it matter? Can someone show me why defaulting to making the workplace more disability friendly is actually a problem? The nerve of this community
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Shopping? I've literally watched "emotional support" dogs sitting on the tables at restaurants eating from their owners plates. I would have to think food code trumps disability accommodation, especially since the law isn't "you have to let them do whatever the fuck they like" but "provide reasonable accommodations".
rincebrain 2y ago
My personal experience in the two years or so has lead me to conclude that a lot of employers have started wanting medical paperwork for much more inane cases than they historically did, and in response, a lot of medical providers have started saying "no" to such requests, since they (pretty reasonably, to me) don't want to be in the business of saying "yeah they were sneezing for 3 days maybe don't make them come in", or such inane things. Of course, this screws over people with problems who could get such paperwork before but didn't need to, as well as people who existed in the gap where they didn't need that before so now if they try to report it, they're going to get questions about "why don't you have a paper trail of this?", as well as "you didn't seem sick". Because, shockingly, if you tell people, directly or indirectly, that you prefer the people who don't have an illness, they will learn to cover it up real well, or they get fired or quit when everyone but them gets promoted.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  I have a disability that has to be accommodated. It is very legitimate, but it is not exactly 'easy to see'. I have mountains of paperwork I submit at this point, because over time I have noticed a simple 1 page medical explanation was starting to get rejected, so I'd have to go back and forth getting more and more. Now I'm at the point where I am submitting 25 pieces of discrete information, from multiple professionals. Frankly, it feels humiliating but I would negatively affect my life I didn't go through the rigamarole. Then there's the whole 'is this influencing whether I get promoted or not' questions and such. When WFH became common place, it became so much easier for me to exist as a human being with some dignity left on the table, but alas, who cares about that, god forbid we give that any credence in the modern work place. There's already a huge body of work about how people with disability face discrimination in multiple aspects of our lives, including work, yet the culture still thinks people want to declare these with HR because it makes their life easier? Oh it sure doesn't.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    People are bad at modeling behavior they're unfamiliar with. People who have never had any problems with executive dysfunction think you just don't want to if you say you're having trouble doing XYZ and you don't have some visible injury because for them, there's never been any disconnect between "deciding to do it" and "doing it", so they think you're making shit up. People who have never had significant physical impediments can't imagine "just push through it" being a thing that you're doing constantly so pushing further is going to fuck you up for a week or two, and so on.
quickthrowman 2y ago
> Actual instances of disability accommodation being abused aren't exactly rampant. Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding. Also, security blanket animals, I forgot the actual term they use but that’s what they are.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  >Check out pictures or videos of ‘people in wheelchairs’ at Southwest Airline gates who sit in a wheelchair simply for priority boarding. I fly very often, and my company has on many an occasion forced me to use Southwest Airlines. I have taken far more flights where there was there wasn't anyone flying in a wheel chair to begin with, than ones where this is even a possibility. Again, the people that are the loudest here are the people worried about it happening and perhaps some folks on social media platforms posting about doing it, but the inverse evidence that its a real, rampant issue is lacking, even anecdotally its inconsistent.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    I'm disabled and I've done it many times (though never in USA). It's probably bullshit. Thing is that you might be able to walk but not able to do the distances in an airport, and sometimes in airports they just sit you in a wheelchair for their own convenience, because they have 10000 other people to take care of. There's degrees of disability. Someone might be able to do a few steps, that doesn't mean they're 100% fine. quickthrowman is just finding excuses to get outraged hating at disabled people.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Emotional support animals, which are not a concept recognized by the ADA.
gotoeleven 2y ago
Peer comment mentions the ridiculous "emotional support dogs" situation. Another example is the ridiculous abuse of ADD diagnoses to get extra time on tests. Oh and CA just had to roll back and fire, respectively, the soft on crime laws (prop 14) and public officials (oakland mayor, los angeles DA) because, surprise surprise, they lead to way more crime. People respond to incentives even if you don't think they do. Lots of people who work from home don't do much work.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  All of these examples have nothing to do with disability accommodations at work. Lots of people in offices don't do much work too. I mean, that was true before people worked from home. Can you actually cite any statistics that prove this is a widespread, pervasive issue? Anecdotal evidence only seems to serve proof that you're annoyed at a bunch of things people do in society and somehow that means accommodations in the workplace for people with disabilities must also have the same perceived issues.
tarlinian 2y ago
I like how you edited this to add "at work" after folks provided examples of it happening outside of work. If you'd like a slightly more work adjacent example, see the rampant increase in IEPs for students in the bay area. (I'm sure that the increased time for tests provided in many of these cases is not being abused at all...)
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Contextually, it was always about being at work. The entire conversation I have focused on work accommodations. I suppose I thought it was clear. The bar for getting an accommodation at work has been higher than many other places (like bringing an emotional support animal to a store). I can't speak to schools, that is also another very delicate social dynamic that has different incentives on how to handle these things than a place of business does.

olyjohn 2y ago

That's bullshit and just shows you have no clue what you're talking about. Regular people who don't live in some rich people's bubble can't even get a PCP without waiting weeks or months. And fuck off if you need to see a specialist with anything, there's another 3 months. Not to mention mental health specialists won't write you shit if you don't have an established relationship with them.

benced 2y ago
Even accepting your claims about medical access at face value - which I don't, they're ridiculous (even if you believe, as I do, the American medical system is bad) - the existence of a substantive population that has the means to exploit a system means that the system has to defend against them. Same concept as folks cheating on a test, people committing return fraud etc. The most anti-social people ruin it for everyone.

rincebrain 2y ago

I don't think it does, actually. Let's say, hypothetically, that someone gets this benefit who has no health condition that anyone will admit exists without being paid a bribe. Are you arguing that you're taking something from the company by them allowing this? You rapidly run into a similar problem to one many means-testing programs for benefits in the US do - it becomes far more expensive to do the testing than it would to just give people the benefit if they ask for it, even if many more people asked for it. And if some core job requirement makes WFH an actual nonstarter (e.g. if you're being paid to move packages in a warehouse, you generally can't do that from your bed), then it doesn't matter if your doctor says you can't do it, they can still fire you for not meeting a core requirement of your job that they can't just work around.

benced 2y ago
If you think work from office is more productive, then yes, they are taking something from the company and their coworkers who can't learn from them. If you feel that WFH has no productivity impact, then fair enough that you see any coercion as an unwarranted risk.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  Even if we say yes, WFO is more productive, for the purposes of this argument, unless this also shields you from being fired for not doing enough if you are less productive at home, that seems like it falls into the normal range of variation of productivity? Or, put differently, what's stopping someone from delivering WFH levels of productivity in the office, in this framing? If it's that they'd be punished for being unproductive, what's stopping that in the WFH parallel?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    Receiving an accommodation definitely shields you from being fired for underperformance if the accommodation itself is what's preventing you from performing. If a datacenter employee receives desk work as an accommodation for mobility issues, the company can't turn around and fire them for not performing enough maintenance tasks from their desk.