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More information I forgot for my first post. If an employee is having problems getting work done due to a disability there usually is an EAP Employee Assistanc

More information I forgot for my first post. If an employee is having problems getting work done due to a disability there usually is an EAP Employee Assistance Program recommended by the state or city you can refer the employee to for counseling, evaluation, and treatment that can help them recover and get their work done. This is usually reserved for mental health issues, stress, depression, alcoholism, personal problems like divorce or spousal abuse aka domestic violence and emotional cruelty etc. Also employment law has a clause in it that if the employer suffers an undue hardship in accommodating the employee, it can be used as a defense in a discrimination trial. If the employee wins the discrimination trail they are usually awarded one year of their salary (The lawyers usually collect 2/3rds of this amount for legal fees, leaving 1/3rd for the employee) and in some if not most cases the lawsuit is usually settled out of court to avoid negative publicity. Honestly because I've been on disability for so long, I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. It is not the money nor the position, it is being treated fairly that I look for, and that means the right company and the right manager. I would not even mind doing PC repairs and troubleshooting instead of programming or something else like that.

bane 14y ago
> I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing. Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees. From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.
- orionblastar 14y ago
  I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say I was the best, but I did valuable work. I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill? The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines. But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming. But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money. I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.

bane 14y ago

> I'd take a reduced salary and reduced position if I was treated like a human being for once. Right, that's the thrust of my question. A person with a mental illness may not simply be capable of providing the value to their company of say a $150k/yr job, but firing them sort of implies to me that they have no value to the company. If the employee is able to show that they can provide value to the company, just at a lower position I'm thinking that would be a good alternative to outright firing. Not talking about your case specifically, I can say this, from an employees perspective, having a peer that is not pulling their weight for whatever reason is infuriating as the slack ultimately ends up on the other employees. From personal experience, I've had several peers who couldn't fulfill their full-time job assignments (for a wide variety of reasons), and I and my other team mates were already pulling 40-50 hour weeks. Having to add another 5-10 hours per week to our loads to make up for one of our peers was really simply unfair to us as well.

orionblastar 14y ago
I provided value to the company, I migrated legacy code to modern programming languages, I debugged the code from other programmers that couldn't figure out why their programs didn't work right, I was one of the few that actually wrote documentation, used a standard naming convention for variables, used comments in code to explain to other programmers what it did, I converted from MS-Access databases to MS-SQL Server because nobody else knew how. I wouldn't say I was the best, but I did valuable work. I mean the original article in this thread is a man with schizophrenia who was a success at college, how is he less valuable to the college because he is schizophrenic? John Forbes Nash Jr. is schizophrenic and he won an award for economics in the Nobel Prize, should he be given a lower salary and lower position because he is mentally ill? The other workers could not finish their tasks because they were too busy trying to bully and harass me, so management reassigned many of their tasks to me to finish. I even took work home and worked at home for no extra pay to meet deadlines. But because of the constant stress from the bullying and harassment I would keep becoming sicker and sicker, yet I was able to still get work done. Eventually I suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress and had a panic attack at work, and then was fired on that very same day. That experience had broken me, and my doctors put me on disability being too sick to work. Being put on disability also broke me, it made me develop a mental block and writer's block which I am only now overcoming. But had I not been bullied and harassed, I would still be doing valuable work and earning even more money. I admit there are those out there smarter and better than me, but I am not an idiot because I am mentally ill despite people thinking that.