“If we do it for you, we’ll have to do it for everybody”: 4 worst practices for employers
Accommodate, accommodate, accommodate! I started practicing law two years before Congress enacted the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), and four years before it took effect (1992 for larger employers, 1994 for smaller ones). In my foggy memories of that pre-ADA world, one thing that stands out is the idea that an employer could never go wrong by treating everybody exactly the same. That was the way to avoid liability for discrimination. The ADA changed all that with the concept of “reasonable accommodation.” (Title VII already required reasonable accommodation for religious beliefs, but those situations were not common, and religious accommodation obligations were not onerous . And the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which required reasonable accommodation for disabilities, applied only to federal contractors.) After the ADA took effect, we spent a lot of time training supervisors and managers and even Human Resources professionals, to abandon the mentality that everybody should...