Can employers legally deny medical accommodation requests?

[rossplendent]

Corporations really love to do the equivalent of Michael Scott saying "I... Declare... BANKRUPTCY!!!"

[timarheit]

Have a friend working at the Ohio BMV, The manager won't let them have their glucose meter on during work. Manager complained both about the alarm the went off when the glucose was low/high, and the fact that her phone was part of the monitor.

[lamineral]

I am an ADA accommodation specialist, so that means I am the middle man between your doctor and your employer. I get all the medical info and write up a request with medically supported accommodations. And there are many times where an accommodation may be medically supported, but the employer will not accommodate. There’s a lot to the process that many people don’t understand and I have been thinking about spreading more awareness and educating people on it.

[snoopy]

A fellow nurse got attacked by a patient at our workplace and hurt her shoulder pretty bad. My employer refused to let her come back on modified.They said stay on disability until you're a hundred percent and don't come back before that. She couldn't survive on 60% of her income and she quit.We lost the best nurse we had.

[angeldark]

I had an employer try this crap. Tried demeaning me, told me his wife was a nurse (what that had to do with anything idk) He screamed at me : "I'm calling my lawyer!" With the implications that I would be fired if I pressed further...

Came back half an hour later with everything I was asking for. (A safe, private place to pump breastmilk that was not in a bathroom.) I was the first of 3 pregnancies in a very short time period.

I didn't care if it was a closet. Just wanted a private place to pump that wasn't in my car near an interstate in the middle of the night, and wasn't a freaking bathroom bc ewww wtf.

[KiKiQuiQuiKiKi]

In the case of my disabled friend, her employer is a highly profitable HMO and HR keeps telling her she’s the “first person” they’ve had with this issue (blindness), so they don’t know what to do.

[auntiem]

One of my husband’s coworkers got a $2, 500 chair from their boss to do his job.
When the guy got transferred, that chair went with him.

The company paid to move it.
He worked for the government.

[KailyKail]

I requested an accommodation. My HR rep just quit his job and never passed on the responsibility to anyone else. I never got the accommodation, and was laid off due to performance.

[McBehrer]

I had an employer who literally just said "no, we don't need to do that, " for really simple accommodations that I had a doctor's note for and everything. Their hr backed them up, so I basically just had nothing I could do. then I'm pretty sure they retaliated by denying me a promotion and making shit up to fire me.

I also had no way of contact HR by email, because they wouldn't let us, so I couldn't save any email records of the conversations.

[TacticalLeo]

Wish I learned about this when I worked at Paradise. All I asked for was a chair to sit down on as I was dealing with lower back pain and plantars fasciitis. They said no to me. Doctors note and everything.

[navijam]

My old employer genuinely had this reason to turn away any applicants that were unable to handle stairs. It's also almost entirely wheelchair inaccessible.

We were a grade listed building and the ability to alter the layout of the building in major ways would have been structurally out of the question. All requests for a lift were denied because the building was too old and historically significant to handle the amount of structural changes it would take to have one. It's also a literal maze with hidden staircase doorways to attic rooms, random staircases to get to separate higher levels and an entire back building that used to be stables. Even with a lift you would rarely encounter a room that you didn't need to go up a certain amount of stairs for.

[geraldtarrant]

A Home Depot i was a vendor for a contractor at, hired a blind person and had a full time whole other person helping them perform their duties. So other companies need to get their sh%$ together

[DTWMTX]

Ryan, you are doing a great service to people! Thanks

[elizaberhim]

Interesting. My husband was fired from Amazon for not meeting productivity goals, however he was not meeting his productivity goals because they would not provide him any accommodations for a very well documented injury that he had 3 different doctors give paperwork for said necessary accommodations.

[BrutalJambon]

As a French I don't understand how they can deny accommodations because they "don't have the expertise". I'm sure almost every H.R department / employer, especially the smaller ones, must have 0 knowledge of how to accommodate X or Y disability. Why aren't they just required to get someone who knows to get everything setup? Here in France, the "Occupational Medecine", the branch of the national health insurance that oversees health in the workplace, does exactly that. When it's established that someone has a disability and need accommodations, they send someone who is a specialist in ergonomics to the job site so they can see how it is and what will be needed considering the person's issues. Then they just send a rapport to the employer with everything they need to do or buy. When it's done they come see if it's been done correctly and voilà.

[swtgrlno]

I bet you could get a class action on walmart. I can't tell you have many senior door greeters that could definitely use a stool or chair to sit at least occasionally..

[RyokoAsakuraLastFan]

I work at Meijer and recently they cut our door greeters hours down next to nothing then gave them an option to leave or transfer positions.

However most of our door greeters where either physically or mentally handicap so most could not do any other tasks

[jaya]

Your captions keep saying "undo" when they should be "undue".

[mikee]

There are other reasons, too, a change to a policy that does not fit with the company goals, the impact on other employees, and customers. Then there's a grandfather clause, buildings built before 1980. I lived in a senior/disabled persons apartment building. All the apartments had steel bathtubs and handrails, but only one out of 60+ apartments had a roll in shower. Would not change them because of financial hardship and the fact it was built in 1978. It met the standard for compliance in '78. The parking lot? 3 handicapped spots. the best spot was the managers only. Her working hours were 10 to 3 m-f, and no, you can't use it ever. It sat empty most of the time.
I tried to report them, but someone told me the manager and the person who worked at the "complaint" fraud, waste, and abuse for the ada knew each other by marriage. True or not, I never heard anything from anyone other than a verbal "No."

[ashlee]

Omg thank you for every lil tidbit. Out on ADA. Have no restrictions. Aside from it being an intermittent ongoing disability that I will have for life and its not guaranteed to always effect me. They lost all of my paperwork and emails from my local leave officer so I had to go through and send everything back over to the head of leave in CA. She said it was undue hardship bc I had been gone several weeks. However I wanted and have tried to come back. She put me in touch with a new local leave manager and I have heard NOTHING from them. I called the head of HR and asked what was going on. Why everyonr was ghosting me. I got a VM a month ago..sneaky.. no email.. saying they were still reviewing my restrictions to work. I have endless documentation about this and other ridiculous things that happened but it's been a month. Yesterday I received a letter in the mail stating that they may have leaked some of my personal info.