Employers are not legally permitted to consider a worker’s medical condition when making employment decisions. Unless a medical condition completely prevents someone from performing certain work, disabilities should not factor into their employment opportunities.
If a worker can do the job on their own or with reasonable accommodations, employers should treat them like any other candidate. Hiring, promotions and termination decisions should all depend on experience, job performance and capabilities, not protected characteristics like someone’s medical conditions. Unfortunately, businesses often discriminate against workers with disabling medical conditions. The following are some of the ways that disability discrimination too often manifest in the workplace.
Unfair treatment
A company might extend an offer of employment to a worker and ask them to come in for training or to sign paperwork. When the person shows up in a wheelchair or with a cane, the organization’s attitude toward the employee may suddenly shift. Other times, companies may terminate multiple workers who have medical conditions at one time as part of a mass layoff or downsizing effort. They might also deny perfectly capable workers advancement opportunities for no discernible reason other than their known medical conditions.
Denied accommodations
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) established the basic right for workers to receive support from their employers for medical challenges. Companies generally have to provide reasonable accommodations for employees if such accommodations are necessary for their health and safety. Accommodations can range from modifying job responsibilities to providing assistive technology. Unfortunately, even when accommodation requests are minimal and reasonable, employers may refuse to offer the support that workers need to do their jobs well.
Overt hostility
Sometimes, companies do not intervene when workers with disabling medical conditions face mistreatment on the job. Organizations may not respond to complaints of a hostile work environment where coworkers endanger or otherwise mistreat someone with a disabling medical condition. When the behavior of supervisors or coworkers reaches an untenable point, the employee may experience a hostile work environment. Accepting abusive treatment effectively becomes a condition of their employment.
Those experiencing disability discrimination may need to document what happens so that they can assert themselves. Filing a lawsuit is sometimes necessary if a company treats workers differently because of a medical condition or refuses to provide them with reasonable accommodations.