Employees are human beings, and the more employers behave consistently with this fact, the better it is for everyone. If you want to know what the workplace would look like without legal protections that account for the variations in human experience, look at the workplace culture of several decades ago, when employers could refuse to hire employees simply because they thought that the employees’ humanity would be too costly for them, or because the employees projected an image other than the one the employees wanted to project.
In the early days of commercial air travel, flight attendants had to be young, tall, thin, unmarried women. Most of those requirements came from the airlines’ desire to present a glamorous image, with flight attendants who looked like fashion models; remember that these were the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers also dressed to be seen, wearing elegant clothes even on red-eye flights. I
n the early 20th century, some school districts even restricted the teaching profession to unmarried women; the thought of employees having family responsibilities at home was too much for employers to bear. Many employers would not even consider anyone except white men for the highest-paid and most public-facing positions; job seekers who did not fit that description did not have a chance of being hired, regardless of whether the employer stated this explicitly. Today, laws prohibiting employment discrimination cover many protected characteristics, beyond race, sex, and marital status.
Disability is one such characteristic protected from discrimination in the workplace. The Boulder disability discrimination lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys LLP can help you exercise your right to a discrimination-free workplace if you have disclosed your disability to your employer.
Disability and Other Protected Characteristics
Employers can fire you if you do your job poorly or if you antagonize your coworkers. If you and the other candidates who apply for the same position have similar employment histories and perform equally well on sample work tasks, it is legal for the employer to pass over you and hire another candidate who has a better rapport with the other employees. If you are employed on an at-will basis, meaning that you do not have an employment contract that guarantees that the employer must keep you on the payroll until a certain date, the employer can even fire you arbitrarily, for no discernible reason. None of these things counts as employment discrimination.
It is only employment discrimination if the employer takes an adverse action against you because of a protected characteristic. An adverse action can include refusal to hire or termination of employment, as in the above examples. Other adverse actions include excessive scrutiny of your work, negative performance reviews, refusal of promotions, or changing your work schedule, work location, or duties in ways that you did not request. Protected characteristics are aspects of a person’s personal or family history that are discernible and that do not change quickly. Skin color, sex, and religious affiliation or lack thereof are protected characteristics. Age is a protected characteristic once the employee reaches the age of 40. Disability is also a protected characteristic.
Employment laws define disability broadly as any long-term physical or mental health condition that affects a person’s daily life. The disability can be temporary or permanent, and it can be immediately noticeable or not. Mobility impairments, blindness, and Deafness are protected disabilities, but so are chronic pain, clinical anxiety, and some types of neurodiversity. Employment laws apply the same protections for pregnancy as they do for disabilities, with or without officially categorizing pregnancy as a disability.
How Can You Tell if Your Employer’s Actions Count as Discrimination?
You have a disability, and your employer takes an adverse action against you, such as not giving you the promotion you applied for. This does not always count as disability discrimination; the truth of the matter is in the details. An employer’s adverse action only counts as discrimination if it is because of the employee’s protected characteristic. You would have a case to file a disability discrimination claim if you had received promotions in the past, but before you applied for this promotion, you were diagnosed with a disability and disclosed it to your employer, and this time, the employer refused to give you the promotion. Of course, the employer might be able to refute your claim by showing that there were other reasons that they did not give you the promotion. Maybe the employer is suffering financial hardship, and they did not give anyone the pay raises they asked for this year. Maybe the employer has evidence that you engaged in misconduct. When disability discrimination lawsuits make it to court, which they only do after a long preliminary investigation, both the employer and the employee have the chance to present their side of the story to the court.
Employers, Employees, and Reasonable Accommodations
Employees with disabilities have the right to reasonable accommodations in the workplace. An accommodation is something the employer does to make it possible for an employee to do his or her job when, without the accommodation, the disability would be an obstacle. This might be a workplace modification, such as a wheelchair-accessible desk for an employee who uses a wheelchair or a dimly lit office for an employee who is sensitive to bright lights. The accommodation is reasonable if it is not excessively expensive for the employer to provide it. Since not all employers have equal resources, an accommodation that would be reasonable at one workplace might be infeasible at another; do not automatically assume that your employer is discriminating against you if they do not grant your request for the same accommodation your previous employer gave you. Employers and employees should negotiate until they agree on an accommodation that the employer can make.
Contact HKM Employment Attorneys, LLP, About Disability Discrimination
The Boulder employment lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys, LLP, can counsel you about disability discrimination claims. Contact the employment lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys LLP in Boulder, Colorado, to set up a consultation.
