Hiring people with disabilities

[Seshat]

The Slightly Controversial thread on Customer's Suck veered straight into a 'hiring people with disabilities' thread.

Since the topic is so popular, here's a Fratching thread to discuss it in. Started by your friendly disabled moderator.

Have fun.

[crazylegs]

Having a Specific Learning Disorder (dyspraxia see here :- http://www.dyspraxiafoundation.org.u..._dyspraxia.php ) I am doing a job that fits in nicely, I would never be a calligrapher, cartographer nor portrait painter as that is not where my strength lies.

Most people who I have worked with who are disabled are aware of what their bodies are capable of and what they are not, so to insist that someone with a physical disablity should work in an environment which would be difficult to work around is crass and insensitive at best.

I am not saying that someone who is disabled should not work, but it is up to each individual (disabled or otherwise) to work with their strengths and around their weaknesses, for example someone who has not got the use of their legs may not be a suitable security guard but would have no problems as a CCTV operator.

The above example is just a tiny snapshot and of course is not illustrative of all those with disabilites but as I said, one tiny example.

[Greenday]

I don't see any problems with hiring a disabled person to do a job, as long as they can actually perform the job. It goes the same for any non-disabled person. If you can actually perform the job, then great. But if you can't do the job, you just shouldn't apply.

[Saydrah]

Greenday is missing part of that statement. If you can do the job with or without reasonable accomodation, apply. Disability isn't something wrong with a person because they're lazy or not good enough. If the whole world was captioned and we didn't use noise to communicate, would deafness still be a disability? Or would the ability to hear be the disability, because it would distract us all from paying attention to sign language and captions? Someone who needs reasonable accomodation to do a job is just as useful an employee as someone who doesn't. After all, most employees have one disability or another. Some are just more obvious than others.

Like, say, the teenybopper who has the disability of being unable to stop texting while on the clock. It makes her less able to work, but she still probably has an easier time finding a job than the hard-working college grad who uses a wheelchair for mobility. Or the dipshit who has the disability of being totally unable to show up on time, but has an easier time getting hired than the punctual deaf man.

Not to say people with disabilities can't be assholes, lazy, or just plain bad at their jobs. Everyone is a person, and everyone has flaws, and being disabled doesn't make someone inspirational or hard working or courageous or any of that nonsense. It makes them disabled, and who they are as a PERSON defines everything else. But, if who they are as a person is someone who works their butt off, it shouldn't matter if that butt's planted in a chair and they need a little help with some tasks around the office.

[Greenday]

It all really depends on the job being applied for. I mean, let's take firefighters for example. People's lives may literally depend on them. Certain disabilities can make a world of a difference for that job. So if the demands of the job are too great for certain disabilities, nothing can be helped. But if it's a job that the disability has nothing to do with, I don't think the employer should discriminate against the disabled person. There's just no reason to.

[Saydrah]

Being a firefighter is a job that someone with certain disabilities can't do, even with reasonable accomodation.

However, there's no reason to, say, refuse to hire a blind person for a job involving data entry because they would need the accomodation of a screen reader and headphones in order to perform the job.

[Seshat]

Someone who has to sit rather than stand can be a perfectly capable checkout operator - provided she is given a stool to sit on. If she can't load bags into a trolley but can churn a lot of people through and be polite and handle difficult people, she can't do a checkout/bagging position at a main register but could be the best express-register operator a store has ever had.

Or in a highly specialised trade: a wood carver whose back has gone on her may need a special chair and bench to work on, and may need the workshop's labourer to bring her wood and take away her carved pieces. But since wood carving takes hours to do for each small piece, the labourer may spend five or ten minutes a day at most hauling wood for the carver.

That's reasonable accomodation.

As for the firefighter example, I'll say* the same thing I said in the gender thread when it brought up: if a task is part of the job, then it's reasonable discrimination to say that only people who can do the task can do the job. A checkout operator who can't scan groceries is useless, so is a wood carver who can't carve, or a firefighter who can't control a firehose or rescue a victim.

*okay, paraphrase.

Noone that I know who advocates reasonable accomodation for the disabled is advocating employing people who just can't do the job. To me, that's a strawman argument.

In the Slightly Controversial thread, people talked about their experiences with the disabled, such as that deaf people with lipreading skills turned out to be great bartenders at a noisy bar. Or about not being willing to teach people with learning disabilities, because it was just not something they felt they could do. I found that really fascinating - anyone got anything to add about their own experiences or opinions?

[CancelMyService]

I just wanted to add that I've been told on more than one occasion that deaf people may be better suited to work in noisy surroundings like a bar or machine shop since the natural tendency of hearing folks is to try to hear what's being said first and then look for hand signs/lip reading second. Someone deaf would just skip to the second part and save time for everyone.

My best friend is a contractor who builds houses for a living, and he said the deaf guy on his crew is the best person to work with since he's the only one he can communicate with when all the saws/hammers/etc are going full blast. He even learned some basic sign language to make things go even smoother.