Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

I dunno. I don't like the idea of companies holding inquisitions on just how disabled people are, but if we're going to hold the expansive view of disabilities the article takes for granted it seems inevitable. When someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.

> someone claims that they're unable to work in an office because they're suffering from a stress disorder, it's reasonable to have some followup questions about how they manage the disorder on other occasions that call for them to leave home.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.