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Comment by adamredwoods | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, zero repercussions. Who will sue them? Individuals cannot, the process of law is long and requires substantial money. Government is difficult enough to get involved, and will soon lack resources to intervene or impose fines.

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I'm not sure if that's the right take: the Americans with Disabilities Act is maybe the most plaintiff-friendly tort law in the US. There's whole law firms specializing in finding viable plaintiffs to take on contingency (i.e at no cost).

That might matter if it weren't for forced arbitration clauses.

There are tort firms doing that in every area of tort law. ADA cases are not easy wins and don’t often produce significant awards.

Amazon is big enough that they might even be able to get a class action lawsuit going, to be honest. If enough people started coming forward about disability discrimination.

It seems to me that the payout for the employee would need to be enough that they never have to work again because of the risk that they won't be able to find a new jobs after having a lawsuit on their record.

Which record that most employers would check includes lawsuits against former employers?

The New York Times. Washington Post. Seattle Times.

If you take Amazon to court and win a labor lawsuit, your name will be ALL over the papers.

Employees have and will continue to take Amazon to court over issues like this and go completely under the radar. The case would also highly likely be settled out of court to avoid this exact issue because they don't want it in the papers either. For an individual doing a (for Amazon) low stakes lawsuit you're highly sensationalizing the situation.

That's why we've got trade unions, if only software engineers stopped believing they were above employer abuse.

It would be an interesting idea if employees at tech companies organized unions _for each other_. Like the guys at Apple ran the union for Microsoft and negotiated for them and visa versa.

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