Finding a job and holding it down can be difficult when you suffer from a disability. But you should still enjoy the same equal employment opportunities as everyone else. Unfortunately, those opportunities don’t always come automatically, especially for people who have disabilities.
That’s why it’s important that you’re proactive in protecting your rights as a worker, which means knowing the law and how it might apply to your set of circumstances.
Knowing about reasonable accommodations
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that your employer probably has to provide you with reasonable accommodations if you ask for them. These accommodations can be pretty wide-ranging and can touch on any aspect of the employment process.
Some things to consider could include the use of braille in the hiring process, the installation of ramps to make a work area accessible, or even a standing desk for those who are unable to sit for extensive periods of time.
Hopefully by making a reasonable accommodation request your job can be made more accessible and your tasks easier to accomplish.
When can your employer deny a reasonable accommodation request?
As good as reasonable accommodations may sound, they’re not guaranteed. To start, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires employers to make reasonable accommodations, only applies to certain employers. For example, only employers who have 15 or more employees are subjected to this federal law. So, if you work for a smaller business, then you might face more difficulty in securing the accommodations that you need.
The undue burden
Yet, even if you work for a company that is subject to the ADA, you could face pushback. In a lot of instances, employers try to argue that the requested accommodation is an undue hardship. This is because under the ADA, employers are able to justify forgoing a reasonable accommodation request if they can show that the accommodation, if enacted, would create an undue hardship.