More disabled Americans are employed, thanks to remote work
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
To give one example... about 2 years ago I had to spend about 10 months on near-total bed rest to get a healing-resistant foot ulcer to finally heal. I was able to work from bed for almost all of that. If I'd been working an office job it basically would have been a choice - keep my job, or keep my foot.
I actually was just having to navigate that/short term disability as I'm coming off missing about 3.5 weeks from an extended period of extreme unpleasantness that ended in me getting my gallbladder 86'ed last week.
ADA potentially but a lot of my stuff basically boils down to "being out of the house and active is both physically and mentally draining and more likely to get me sick with some random thing". So the reasonable accommodation is basically remote work (I'm a software dev, which is about as remote-friendly a career as it gets).
Illegal, if you can prove it. So functionally, legal.
> "I have diagnosed high-function autism. Do I disclose?"
Nope. There's zero reason to disclose until there is an actual barrier that can fall under ADA.
And ADA isn't a guarantee you'll get what you need, it is asking the employers for a modification, one which they don't have to grant if they have a legitimate reason.
The worst part: It's a tax writeoff like all the other business expenses they're so happy to buy without question. Sometimes it's even covered by grant money.
You can thank the existence of every single independent company to the existence of that tax writeoff you find so unfortunate.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/odep/program-areas/employers/ac...
Your employer may find WFH unreasonable and deny it. Or they may find it reasonable and let you go for it.
But there are no "general rules" when it comes to ADA work accommodations.
I don’t think anything you said contradicts what I have been told, though maybe I didn’t explain it very well.
Any law that requires an employee to negotiate with their employer would seem to be a rather toothless law given the power imbalance involved. Maybe that’s the larger problem.
Picking out WFH as 'not protected' is largely meaningless. This is why it is called _reasonable_ accommodation, not _required_ accommodation.
As with any job, how you do your job, where you do your job, etc. can change based on the number of farts the CEO has passed today.
Yes, worker protections in the US are abysmal. You'll never find me arguing otherwise.
So, if the job doesn't pan out, you are going to be in a rather severe financial bind for quite a awhile until those re-applied benefit(s) restarts for you.
Hence, many disabled are looking for work that do not pay more than $800-1200/month (USD) ... just to avoid their re-evaluation trigger.
For SSDI, if your earned income is more than $1110 in a month (for 2024), then you consume one of your 9 trial work months. That $1110 threshold is regardless of your SSDI payment amount and it is adjusted annually. The trial work months are to allow disabled persons to attempt to return to the workforce without risking losing their social security benefits if it proves unsustainable for them.
(The specifics are a little more complicated than what I've described.)
This is an important lesson, as it should alert us that there likely are other ways our society operates that make a disease into an impediment that could be changed. If you want to know what they are, go talk to disabled rights advocates!
> The model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets. Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference, like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.
> The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control.
> Not everyone uses the social model and that’s ok. How anyone chooses to talk about their impairment is up to them.
(I'm disabled myself, in case it matters)
Correct. The technological model OP posited would involve technologies that let blind and deaf folks navigate the world. The social model hits a barrier at that point.
I'd argue that deafness can be completely mitigated by societal improvements, for most purposes except birdsong etc. and certain genres of music. Blindness is more difficult (e.g. vision is useful for navigation, and we can't choose the surfaces in a forest to make echolocation easier), but in principle computer technology can help with that. (I'd say a decent automated audio description is still a hundred years out, but we'll only get it if we make progress.) Certain mental impairments (e.g. some depression, some sensory issues) have no known mitigations, even in theory, so remain disabilities in all circumstances.
Perhaps these things are culturally significant, above and beyond their inherent social value, but that isn't intrinsic or necessary.
I don't understand how a bunch of happy, young attractive people is a diverse group at all.
Are they always?
This is a good thing but there are some people who hate the idea of remote work because they can’t comprehend a management style that isn’t their First Grade teacher’s.
I fall into the caregiver bucket, and I'll present an argument I was hearing a lot on linkedin and those kinda places in favor of RTO: Some companies and bosses think that if you're on the clock you shouldn't be taking care of your family.
The reality is a lot more complicated. WFH means I can spend 20 minutes resolving a problem that would've taken me half a day before - driving home, resolving the issue, driving back, finding parking, getting back into the right mindset to do work, etc.
It also means I can join meetings that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to join. (like in your example, the coworker feeding their parents). Admittedly your coworker should probably invest in a mute button lol.
Anyway, yea, WFH is a huge enabler! But I guess some people are kinda ableist/unfair about it.
It's silly. Life goes on. We shouldn't be playing this game of competing on how hard we can lick boots.
As for the, "if you're clocked in, you should be working," that would mean in-office employees are working 100% of the time they're clocked in. Have them prove that this is the case.
Then look at productivity during the pandemic vs now and let then explain how WFH hampered those numbers.
Just a ridiculous mindset by boomers who should have retired a decade ago.
I thought in general it was widely agreed upon at this point WFH is at-least a 10% drop in productivity. Stanford has been doing plenty of research in this area. The argument in favor of WFH has for the most part moved on to now cost savings from not having offices lets you hire more people to make up for the loss in productivity.
https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/working-paper/evolut...
I wonder if they covered that people working from home may get sick less and work longer hours.
Ye gods, I can concentrate better at home than I can in an open floorplan office lol :D
Of course some prefer the office (some of whom from their own inertia), some jobs genuinely need to be or benefit from being done in a shared office space, but for the absolute vast majority of roles the office was always about needing to pass paper documents around, or needing expensive and fixed equipment that is a telephone line or computer.
I keep arguing I don't need to take our annual Workplace Violence Prevention training; but, I have to go online and take it every year. (I just took it a week ago.)
If you write code, blog, etc. please do what you can to be compliant with online accommodation. A handicapped person who can use your widget -- say, a blind person -- will be thrilled and loyal. If they can't and are forced to try to go somewhere in person or something because the online option doesn't work, this may be a huge hardship and may outright cut them out of being able to do certain things at all.
Most people can't WFH. If the courts actually sided with that, the popular backlash would likely be so severe as to overcorrect.
I’m bored by the comment flamewars here every time this topic comes up, though. I get it, some people love remote work and some people don’t. Another expression of the wonderful diversity of humanity. I just did a job search and I’m happy to report that there are still many options for either in-office or fully remote teams. Pick one that suits you and stop getting your blood pressure up over this, seriously.
How can you not care when companies choosing to go fully remote means you have less options to find in-office jobs?
Also I have friends who have great lives built around remote work and I wouldn’t wish for them to lose that!
The world is not designed to be optimized for you, nor should it be. I think it is the height of selfishness to push for a world only suited to your preferences with no concern for those with other preferences or needs.
Disabled people have been begging for years to have more flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.
You have to distinguish not physically being in the office from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't involve being physically in the office much but weren't WFH.
For Capitalism, as in the system wherein the means of production are privately owned, it might be a toss-up. A person who works from home isn’t going around the world providing as much value to the landlord class.
1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees from competitors who do not offer remote work
These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in order to stay competitive.
3) Employers who are fully remote (as opposed to even 1 day per month in office) can hire in different locations. For many roles, you can find great employees in places like Eastern Europe for far cheaper than in Silicon Valley, for example.
Just look at Google.
(Interestingly Charles Schwab is a notable counterexample -- they were forcing people back into office, until the company's finance is in a bad shape, and they rushed to halt that and actually closed down many offices.)
Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who just can’t find enough space to rent otherwise, but that seems to be a minority of office employment to me?
Unlikely. The current "RTO" push is simply executive management not wanting to take the write-down hit on all that unused office space that is a loss now that no one is working inside of it. Once they've either jettisoned the space, or taken the write-down anyway (because they were forced into this) you'll find all these RTO calls dying down.
A majority of the leads I get from recruiters about dev work are from companies who now have hybrid or full on-site requirements. It's being outlawed like you say, but there is a push from certain companies to be back in the office.
The last three contacts I've gotten from recruiters always ask me if I'm ok being in the office three days a week on job req's they've contacted me about. So take solace in the fact more people are opting out of these kinds of jobs and recruiters are telling me the more companies require in office or hybrid, the smaller the pool of worthy candidates - regardless of whether they're disabled or now.
There is push to get people to go back into the office, but at this point, I'm not seeing a real willingness for people to jump at those jobs right now.
- disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation
- finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets
- preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
- accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
- affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting.
The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all.
Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.
If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise? B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was everything being shut down?
I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people may hope.
Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings.
They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office.
Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home.
However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over.
One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention.
> - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.
I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter going way down.
- I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years.
- you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.
I think you didn't read my comment. The problem was parents cancelling daycare because they thought they could take care of kids and work simultaneously without impacting their work.
They literally had daycare, cancelled it, and brought the problem on themselves after WFH was instituted.
> I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine,
You are deluding yourself if you think none of your employees are using their personal phones to talk to each other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal Discords and chat app groups.
As a parent, taking care of a child is itself a full time job. Your friend is either an idiot or was banking on his work being stupid enough to let it slide.
Why is that the company's concern? I genuinely don't understand what responsibility the company has for employees actions outside of work.
If we are now both working from home, does that qualitatively change the situation? When working from home, what even is "outside of work"?
Parents leaving work early and not staying late because of kids is an office problem you didn't mention.
Employees using a personal discord sounds positive. Work relationships are building remotely. When employees in person become close they call personal cells and go to bars to discuss how clueless leadership is. Leadership isn't capturing those conversation why is it suddenly a problem if a discord is used?
This is very common, even when working in an office. Has nothing to do with working from home
*reported
It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature of harassment has changed and is just different from how it was like in-person.
Or it could be that the number of incidents actually just went way up? I don't understand why everyone tries to inject alternate explanations to wave away inconvenient situations.
The parent commenter was absolutely trying to dismiss the core of the story by injecting an alternate reality into it.
> If they're not equally likely, I'm sure you'll have no problem demonstrating that?
The situation I'm referring to was not a simple reporting change. It involved employees quitting over bullying, and in one case there were issues severe enough that law enforcement became involved.
So, not, it was not a simple case of people reporting things differently. These problems did not exist pre-WFH at this company.
But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't convince you.
I really don't know why you're so aggressive. You did not include the context in your original comment that you did with this one, and so someone put forward a very reasonable explanation as to why reports may have went up.
I don't think you can generalize that to other companies or even other departments at your company.
Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-said situation? Maybe. Will they do anything when you send them screenshots of a VP’s icky chats? You bet.
Actually, they will likely transfer the woman or otherwise screw over her career to protect the handy VP.
For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers in that space more.
Note that your HR friends is not a good measure of harassment. Maybe more people filed HR complaints because asshole and abusive behavior was easily documented over chat, etc. Whereas before, you had abusive behavior, for example, inappropriate touches but no witness that a person might not feel comfortable bringing up to HR especially if the abuser is somebody important.
Everyone knows that HR basically exists to protect the company. Unless you have ironclad proof, you may not want to involve them. Remote work would leave more of an undeniable paper trail.
Your friend, however, is an idiot. I know lots of people who have worked remotely for 10+ years, and none of them tried to work their job while taking care of a 3 year old - except maybe during COVID (because it was either that or quit).
As a parent of a toddler, I’m shocked they thought this would work. Kids that young need constant social interaction with their caregiver.
The Covid 19 situations were different since many people were forced into them by daycares and schools closing or “going remote”.
There is nothing new here.
Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.
COVID forced WFH for business reasons and thus employers are no longer as easily able to illegally discriminate against their disabled employees since it's patently obvious that the accommodation is possible and it doesn't present some existential threat to a business to provide it. It's also that employers are simply more geared up to allow work from home and it's less of an actual burden in time and money.
If someone has a legally recognized disability that can be reasonably accommodated by working from home, that's one thing.
But there's nothing illegal nor discriminatory about companies having their workforce be in the office.
Basically, this is the disparate impact argument. You could make a similar argument about having the office only be accessible by climbing a flight of stairs.
It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable, it exposed the hypocrisy of employers.
You don't think that things are any easier now that most of the workforce has practical experience with video conferencing and how to coordinate with people in the same office?
I think we both learned how broadly possible it was, and also trained the whole workforce in how to do it.
I get that some people really like working in close proximity with others even if their job doesn't really require it - but this really seems to be the case of controlling employers demanding their troops trudge into to an office to demonstrate their value in person - pandemic or disability (or just the general annoyance of commuting to work and all that that entails) be damned.
Teams were normally organized so you'd need the least amount of cross office communication as possible because it was recognized how inefficient it was. So yes they were "remote" but everything was organized to make sure you need to communicate with them as little as possible.
I don’t think it showed remote work was not an undue burden ,it just showed that for many organizations that remote work is possible, not that it is fungible with in-office work.
Not to mention, its unfortunately common that exercising any rights workers have will often work against you, being passed up for promotions etc.
Its strange how much power we give employers over employees, and how regular people defend this, even when its actively working against them.
"Because, one day, I will be a rich person, and I will be able to be cruel to the little people. I don't want to prevent me being able to abuse people if I'm in that position!"
Pitting employees against each other is a classic.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338750/average-monthly-...
If you look at net disposable income, the US is ranked 33rd[0]
[0]: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?tm=income%20distribution&...
What I find amazing is you have to really count the rows to get that US is 33rd (alphabetically) as the rows are unnumbered. OP did that and didn't realize the rows are sorted alphabetically.
For net disposable income the US even laps small, rich Luxembourg.
It is the 33rd alphabetically!!
Thanks for proving my point :)
[0] https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?tm=income%20distribution&...
I linked the wrong chart :/
So egg on my face! I meant to link elsewhere but can’t find it again. This again shows the average and not the median, which was not my intention.
I do think LLMs by enabling people to work indepedently (in adiditon to remote) should add degrees of freedom that would help people with disabilties.
LLMs should enable this by easing creation of work contracts (ie allow more accomodations by changing contracts), automation of most of most business operations, ability to quickly get to "average level" on a lot of business concepts, automation of finances (eg: using Runway).
Hopefully the creative piece of building a business will no longer get drowned out by the operational pieces.