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Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home was an undue hardship, and would just point at other employers not doing it to demonstrate this.

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.

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The entire US business culture, which extends deeply into US culture as a whole, puts employers over employees at almost every turn. What protections workers in the US do have, businesses try to circumvent all the time, not to mention many things, such as the ADA have no concrete definitions for things like what a reasonable accommodation must be (they do have examples of generally accepted things, but it isn't a decree) which allows for all kinds of ways of non compliance.

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.

The other side of the coin is that US salaries are among the highest in the world by PPP and 3rd highest nominally.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338750/average-monthly-...

Average is really skewed though, because the top end is very very high and the more important metric would be net income, not gross income (which PPP does not account for)

If you look at net disposable income, the US is ranked 33rd[0]

[0]: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?tm=income%20distribution&...

In case anyone comes along this.

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’m trying to understand how that link supports your claim but utterly failing.

For net disposable income the US even laps small, rich Luxembourg.

Am I reading the data that you linked wrong? It looks to me like US is highest on the chart with $52400. What am I missing?

You are correct. US is 33rd alphabetically and first by the disposable income.

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.

I agree with your reading.

You do realize that US is ranked first in the list .

It is the 33rd alphabetically!!

Thanks for proving my point :)

[0] https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?tm=income%20distribution&...

I have also yet to see a single WFH advocate explaining how to square their replies to objections (usually "managers should find better KPIs") with their theory of the firm (you don't just rely on KPIs, unless you are as good as Bezos at what he does you can't just treat employees as replacable cogs that might as well be replaced by KPI driven freelancers and subcontractors).

Apparently I need to move to Luxembourg.

> 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!"

Also, "I am fundamentally smarter/better/more diligent than my fellow employees. My employer might recognize that with more compensation, but my fellow employees will not. They will drag me down and promote the unworthy."

Pitting employees against each other is a classic.

You sound like the kind of person that needs to start their own company.

COVID acted like a coordinated forcing function. So it's unfair to claim that things would have been just as easy to move to WFH before COVID. Even the FAANGs of the world had to do a LOT of work to make smooth WFH happen, from working on optimizing capacity for teleconferencing software to actually making their corp networks work smoothly remotely at scale.

There is a difference between having one or two people work from home and have a large percentage of the company working from home. A company needs to be changed both culturally and with infrastructure to make it work well.

I think that’s a harsh take. Your last sentence is where the balance of the truth lies: COVID was a watershed event that ushered in new technologies and practices that have made WFH more viable and generally acceptable.

I worked from home before covid. The only thing that really changed for me was that they increased the VPN bandwidth and started consistently adding video calls to all meetings. The technology and practices already existed.

Zoom and Google Meet existed before COVID. What COVID did was force employers to choose between letting people work from home or shut down. Suddenly, what was impossible a few months ago became totally fine.

It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable, it exposed the hypocrisy of employers.

> It didn't make WFH more viable or acceptable

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.

Transition the whole team, and paying for a video conferencing software, to accommodate one person who can't come into the office is exactly what an "undo hardship" is.

In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?

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.

> In pre-Covid times didn't companies face this same insurmountable hardship when opening a second location? What do you call your co-worker that works in a different office if not "remote"?

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.

Only if the company split teams and projects across locations. If they split the work appropriately it would never came up.

You have an ax to grind. Good luck.

COVID was undue burden on most businesses, a lot of them needed PPP and other programs to survive.

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.

> Employers systemically illegally discriminated against employees by falsely alleging that accommodating them with work from home

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.

> 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.

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