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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much me at this point. I've had the same remote job for 9 years, and while I could work an office job at the time I was hired (I was 31 then), now at 40 and with a number of my chronic conditions rather a bit less background than they used to be. Not to mention that pretty much everything I have is either respitory, or one of the major comorbidities for COVID, which is still very much in circulation.

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.

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Would FMLA or ADA have helped? I believe companies would have to justify denying you reasonable accommodations.

FMLA no because it's unpaid leave.

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).

FMLA also has a twelve week limit, and for "highly compensated" employees (a lot of software devs in the US would qualify) you can lose the right to return to the same, or equivalent, position as when you left.

FMLA provides unpaid leave, and usually only up to 12 weeks. I'm not sure how well ADA would apply here, but my wife had a lot of trouble using ADA to even get her employer to use video meeting software with captions (she's deaf, and Zoom didn't have captions at the time.) It eventually worked but took something like 6 months.

The other thing with ADA it's always distinctly had the feel of the kind of thing that sure, they have to (eventually, maybe) comply with, but I can't help but feel it's the sort of thing that will implicitly count against you when it comes to things like promotions. Similar debate (also applicable to me) to "I have diagnosed high-function autism. Do I disclose?"

> implicitly count against you when it comes to things like promotions.

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.

I really wish more people would realize this about the ADA and other similar legislation in other countries - yes, a company is legally required to make reasonable accommodations... but they don't have to be happy about it or hop to it right away. They will delay as long as they can and try to avoid it like the plague if it's going to cost them money.

> They will delay as long as they can and try to avoid it like the plague if it's going to cost them money.

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.

Why wouldn’t it be a tax write off? Profits are taxed, not revenues. If revenues were taxed instead of profits, there would be even more powerful consolidation market forces to vertically integrate every single industry to avoid double-taxing revenue.

You can thank the existence of every single independent company to the existence of that tax writeoff you find so unfortunate.

My reading of GP was that it makes it worse because it means there's much less financial reason to avoid making accommodations - which would be somewhat understandable - and that implies they're doing so for other reasons.

Less financial reason, but not much less. 25%-ish at best, or possibly none at all if they're already running at a loss.

This is the part where many ADA lawyers can punch thru the SSA bureaucracy and make you shine.

Working from home is not considered a reasonable accommodation in the U.S. as a general rule. I hope that changes someday soon.

"Reasonable accommodation" is a negotiation between you and the employer. There is nothing that defines what a "reasonable accommodation" is, up to and including remote work. The ADA gives potential examples, one of which is working at an alternative location.

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.

An employer can legally deny WFH no matter how disabled the employee is even if the employee has already been doing the same job from home for years. To me, that means that legal protections are nonexistent in this regard and therefore practically meaningless.

I don’t think anything you said contradicts what I have been told, though maybe I didn’t explain it very well.

If an employer is required to allow “reasonable accommodations” but is never required to allow working from home, then logically it would seem to follow that working from home is not a reasonable accommodation … or so I had concluded, but technically that might be wrong in some way that’s not very interesting to people actually affected by these laws.

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.

An employer can legally deny just about anything that they consider 'unreasonable', yes. If you injured your back and could no longer stand for hours at a time on a job that requires it and there is no alternative, absolutely you can be let go.

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.

multiple people at previous jobs joked about how using FMLA would get you fired or at minimum banned from promotion

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