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Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

Accommodating disabilities is cost center and and failing to do so is a liability. Businesses use loopholes to “opt out” so they don’t have to deal with those things.

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And taxpayers vote to dump the costs on individual businesses as opposed to spreading the cost over the whole population.

How would this work? I’m pragmatic about the division of public/private responsibilities, so I’m not opposed to the idea, but accommodations are highly specific to the impairment and how it affects the person.

I’m not sure how the government would manage that in a fair manner; if SSDI is any indication, not very well. The SSA has a lot of outdated bias in its guidelines for providing aid.

Reimbursement from government for expenses related to accessibility, or the government hiring personal assistants for handicapped people. If the government cannot handle it, then I do not see why millions of businesses with varying levels of liability would handle it.

At its root, anytime I see the government mandate something but foist the costs on the private sector, it is to pay lip service without actually ponying up the funds. Which is not only the politicians’ fault, because voters will vote for low taxes every time, even though the high level of services is not deliverable with such low taxes.

I thought the parent was making a joke. Is this actually a thing in America? In Australia I have never seen this in any of my contracts.

The only joke is the laughable enforcement of the ADA, including shallow-as-hell obvious ploys to exclude disabled people without saying "we don't want to work with cripples". And pregnant people. Again, to business fucks, these people are liabilities - we can't use their body up since it's already used up.

Take a look over here to see a bunch of anecdotes about this very US based 'policy' https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/15dvtwa/why_do_so...

This also goes directly along side that retail workers are NOT permitted to have chairs at a register, because of the similar reason (standing constantly excludes disabled and pregnant folk). And somehow sitting=lazy unless it's white collar work. We're allowed to be 'lazy'.

it's a thing. companies are responsible for employees health insurance as well, so they'd rather not have someone who actually uses that a lot.

It's also pretty common IME for managers of retail and similar public-facing brick-and-mortar positions to have a bugbear about employees "looking lazy", which includes things like sitting, leaning, walking slowly or aimlessly, etc..

I'm in Appalachia; It is common.

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