No it's not. It makes no sense to say "oh, you can't commute to work and then home again five times a week? so how do you get groceries?" because those are two completely separate things in completely separate environments.
It's none of Amazon's business how people manage their disabilities outside of work. The only thing that matters is what the most effective way of managing their disabilities is inside of work. Amazon is not your doctor, and if your doctor says that this is the most effective way for you to manage things while being productive then they need to accept that the doctor knows what they're doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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"
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.
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