<p>You do it ironchariot! People nd to do well who play to their strengths.</p>
<p>Slackerdad, I don’t have the flexibility in my workplace to hire people who are not able to produce at full-performance level and to adjust pay downward. But I suppose there may be businesses that have more flexibility.</p>
<p>Potentially, someone who is painstakingly slow at a manual task might nevertheless be efficient at roles that are more service-oriented than production-oriented: assisting patrons, giving tours, delivering psychotherapy…</p>
<p>@Slackerdad, the problem is that most workplaces aren’t set up to allow slow, methodical employees to work at their own pace and be paid less. It would be disruptive of normal work flow, make collaboration with others impossible, and require use of a separate pay scale that would be very difficult to properly construct–i.e., how much slower than normal is is Employee A; how about Employee B? And would that system mean that faster employees would have to be paid more? Someone like yourself would be better suited to working as an independent contractor where you could control your own workload and schedule and where, if you promised to complete a job in two weeks, it would be of no concern to the client whether you spent 10 hours or 100 hours to get it done, so long as you met the deadline.</p>
<p>Possibly thats why many tech & other companies have been shifting to greater use of contractors and have been reducing the numbers of actual employees.</p>
<p>Or it could just be that they are cheap and want to get away without paying benefits.</p>
<p>[States</a> Clamping Down on Workers Mislabeled as Contractors - Bloomberg](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?)</p>
<p>I’d like to work someplace where there are no slow workers allowed, does that really exist? You make it sound like it does. Of the three people I supervise, two are slow as snails. On any given day, they accomplish less than half of what I could do when I did their job even though they seem to be doing their best. Based on the obnoxious things I’ve heard them say about people with disabilities, I can guess with pretty high confidence that they are not disabled-- just damn slow. Where is the uproar? Why are slower disabled people unemployable but they are not? I am a little slow at the mathematical aspects of my job due to my disability, but my colleagues are a little slow at most of their jobs just because they’re slow-- I don’t think I should be walking around with an asterisk any more than they should just because there’s a diagnosis to explain my slowness.</p>
<p>I think people who haven’t really had the opportunity to come into contact with lots and lots of disabled people in different settings tend to imagine a worst case scenario where a disabled person is completely incapable of dealing with their life, which fortunately just isn’t reality for so very many disabled people. There are people who are so severely disabled they just can’t cope, surely, but there are thousands of people who are only somewhat disabled who manage to blend in perfectly fine. You have to be careful not to make statements which sweepingly generalize the entire disabled population, it can come across as a little insulting to those who struggle but are perfectly capable of working with you despite it.</p>
<p>ETA: And I understand that, in theory, this thread is about the people who ARE so truly very disabled that they can’t meet the demands of their job, but the ADA doesn’t protect your right to do something you can’t do with <em>reasonable</em> accommodations-- reasonable typically meaning small and relatively insignificant, we all understand that, right? Employers are not required to go above and beyond to change the rules or substantially change the nature of the work for their employees-- there is no such thing as a legal requirement to eliminate deadlines for an incapable employee. If you think these severely disabled people are the only class of disabled people you are talking about, you are talking about a problem which isn’t really a problem. Nobody is forcing a company to tolerate a shoddy worker who can’t perform the basic functions of the job-- and no rational person is arguing that they should be forced, that’s not what ADA is about. That is what makes me detect an undertone in some posts here of complete lack of tolerance for people who have any level of disability that requires simple and reasonable accommodations, which is really indefensible.</p>
<p>@ema thank you for this post, seriously</p>
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<p>Isn’t this just what people used to say (and some still do) about family-friendly workplaces, and family-friendly government policies with generous maternity and paternity leave? Yet this works well in Europe (and Canada, where my sister lives). “This is just the way it’s always been done, and what we are used to” doesn’t cut it if you ask me.</p>
<p>Well, Alan, if you have all the answers, then set up such a workplace.</p>
<p>My oldest is dyslexic, as are many incredibly successful people. School is an entirely different environment than work. She is very successful at work, already, but has not been asked to write any ten page papers with thesauraus words in them.</p>
<p>One of the huge benefits for her of being dyslexic is 95% auditory recall, really pithy and accurate writing (why bother with extra sentences) and an ability to memorize anything the first time she reads it (rather than have to read it again.)</p>
<p>She makes amazing presentations, well spoken, well presented, is given more and more responsibilities, juggles all sorts of tasks, but she just cannnot spell. Everyone who works with her knows she cannot spell. She’s a good bad speller, it’s all phonetic, etc… But, she still can’t and never will. Does this matter? I imagine if she was a copy editor or a book editor it might. As it stands? No problem. </p>
<p>She has a special extremely rigorous (extremely expensive, too!) software which checks grammar and spelling at a really fundamental level… always highlights the their/there words to make sure she chose the right one. Etc… </p>
<p>She owns the software and would never ask an employer to buy it, but she did ask if she could download it on her work laptop. Boss laughed and said, "Yes! Please!)</p>
<p>In the end, given what she does, her dyslexia is actually an asset in her real life, though it was a PITA in school. She managed a very high GPA by working about three times as hard as anyone else. She is sooooo glad school is over for a few years before she has to go to grad school.</p>
<p><<and family-friendly="" government="" policies="" with="" generous="" maternity="" and="" paternity="" leave="">></and></p>
<p>I am a federal employee. There is NO paid maternity leave. You can use your accumulated sick leave and annual leave if you want PAID time off. OTOH, you can take UNPAID leave under the family medical leave act.</p>
<p>That’s right, NO PAID MATERNITY leave unless you use your own accumulated sick and annual leave or take leave without pay</p>
<p>I’d also say that accommodations are kind of a unicorn or myth at the college level. Kids who really need big accommodations won’t graduate. The whole thing is really discretionary and my daughter wrote every paper, took every essay test, etc. got points taken off for grammar and spelling. Etc </p>
<p>She learned to accommodate school rather than the other way around. She learned how to work WITH her dyslexia. </p>
<p>I think in general this is a false conundrum. No dyslexic is going to try for a career doing something they Hate! And they all hate different things. </p>
<p>You’d be surprised, though, at the number of business leaders who are dyslexic or inattentive add. They don’t do as well at the cut and paste stuff, but they tend to be excellent at what they do well.</p>
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<p>Sounds familiar.</p>
<p>“If you think there should be a minimum wage, go ahead and start a business and pay your employees that much.”</p>
<p>“If you think sex/age/race discrimination in hiring is wrong, you can set up your own workplace and hire who you want.”</p>
<p>“If you think sweatshop labour is wrong, open your own factory that treats its workers well.”</p>
<p>Not a libertarian/Tea Partier, sorry.</p>
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<p>I think you misunderstood my point. I referenced specifically Europe and Canada (the U.S. lags behind other countries on mat leave, 'tis true). And by “government policies”, I was referring not to policies for government workers, but for all workers, including in the private sector, because of government regulations. In most industrialised countries, no matter who your employer is, they must give you paid parental leave (though the government often pays all or part of the pay).</p>
<p>Tamp down the hyperbole, Slackerdad. There is no comparison between racial discrimination in the workplace and expecting employees to be able to fulfill the basic functions of their job - one of which is getting things done on a timely basis. Even your much more reasonable analogy about maternity leave doesn’t work, in my opinion. Requiring or expecting employers to provide a benefit to employees is very different from requiring or expecting employers to carry employees who just can’t do the work adequately. </p>
<p>I think at this point we may be moving beyond a discussion of whether or not formal accommodations in college go too far (poetgirl is probably right that we’re setting up a strawman, as far as most cases of LD accommodations are concerned) to the problem of students who may be fully academically capable of graduating college, but whose disabilities may nonetheless make holding down a job extremely difficult. </p>
<p>I’m thinking of someone I know who is able to learn material just fine, but has real issues with higher-level reasoning, including reasoning about things like responding to social situations. She may not have had the easiest time in college, but by dint of working hard, avoiding the toughest classes, and putting herself on a five year plan for graduation, she did reasonably well. I don’t actually think she had formal accommodations at all, although she did back in high school. Since college, however, she has lost several jobs - and I don’t think it is because her employers are heartless. Having an employee who, while hard-working and theoretically qualified, can’t adapt to anything the least bit outside the box and doesn’t have a great sense of what is and isn’t appropriate to say in a workplace setting (including to clients) just isn’t an option in most professional fields. Frankly, she needs a relatively low level job where she is working under someone else’s direct supervision and being asked to do specific tasks. Because she has a college degree - and doesn’t fully recognize her own limitations - she expects more than that.</p>
<p>It is a sad situation, but I don’t think there are any villains here. A couple of generations ago, someone like this person would never have been encouraged to go to college, and would have been steered toward a different kind of job. In general, I think it is great that we have stopped writing off people who are cognitively outside the mainstream, but it does lead to some difficult situations when academic capability doesn’t necessarily translate into professional capability. The claim about school being artificial cuts both ways: for a lot of students, difficulty in school doesn’t mean difficulty in the workplace, but in other cases, ability to succeed in school doesn’t mean success in the workplace, either.</p>
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<p>I work for a city agency (NYCDOE) and like Sue and her federal agency, there is no paid maternity/paternity leave. </p>
<p>While you can take up to 4 years off after the birth of a baby and come back to a comparable position, you are not paid for the time off and you have to pay for your own insurance. </p>
<p>One of the things I notice with women who work for the DOE is that they try to plan babies for to be due in May/June, use their sick days and get paid over the summer (because our annualized salary is paid over the course of 12 months where in some places, you are paid for the school year and collect unemployment for the summer) and come back to work in September. If a child is born July/August, they are paid until the end of august and use their sick days and perhaps borrow up to 20 sick days from future days.</p>
<p>Ema I agree with your last sentence. </p>
<p>There is plenty of information online about the ADA and the workplace, but in general, it is common sense, if you think about the general principle behind accommodations.</p>
<p>Colleges are not required to offer accommodations that cause a financial or administrative burden, or substantially change their academic program and standards. (College is not legally compulsory the way high school is; the standard is higher in high school.)</p>
<p>I think we can all figure out the parallel “reasonable” accommodations at work, though of course it will vary and some of these issues are being determined as court cases establish precedent (in both school and work contexts).</p>
<p>I have a kid with serious health conditions, who is about to graduate. She never stays up late, gets work done in advance, never parties, but even so, still occasionally needs a postponement. If her professors give her two weeks, she still gets her work in the next day. People with disabilities have a drive for normalcy and don’t want favors: accommodations are not enabling, they level the playing field so a student can do his or her own work. That said, if my kid cannot meet her own high standards, she goes on leave.</p>
<p>Maybe it will be a challenge to find work that is possible but the character, discipline and grit that people with disabilities often show, is appreciated by employers and well worth a few days off to stay as healthy as possible.</p>
<p>Sybbie, the state of affairs you are describing is seen as quite backward by the rest of the developing world.</p>
<p>That should read “developed” world, not “developing”.</p>
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<p>Why is that? People pick their poisons. You can have a baby anytime that you want. The net-net is still, that you will burn your own accumulated sick days (however you can borrow up to 20 days from your future time allotment).</p>
<p>I worked in corporate life when my D was born. I received a nice fruit basket and a card from my boss. I also received a nice letter from HR stating what day I needed to be back to work as I was only being paid for 6 weeks (although, I had the option of taking up to 3 months but everything over 6 weeks would be unpaid). I also know a lot of women who have babies and collect NYS disability (no salary from their companies), when they leave to have a baby.</p>
<p>Some people plan end of the school year summer babies so that so there is the least financial hit. Lets say you are a teacher making $50,000 a year. Instead of getting paid your 50k over the 10 month school year, you are paid your 50k over 12 months. In the summer, when school is not in session, you are still receiving your salary. If you work summer school, you get paid in addition to your pay check. If you don’t work over the summer, you still get paid. </p>
<p>If you are maternity leave, you still get paid.For them it works. They have a baby in may/june and return to work in september with no disruption to their finances (for some people this is a big consideration). If they want to take off for 4 years, they can and will still have a job when they return to the doe. I have a co-worker who just returned after being home for 7 years (she had a second child, which extended her time off by another 4 years). </p>
<p>I have another co-worker who Has been working for the DOE for 9 years and is having her first chid. The baby is due in May. She currently has 80 day (16 weeks in her bank). She plans on leaving 2 weeks before her baby is due (lets say that is 30 days). She will use the days in her bank and be paid from may until the end of June. She will be paid by the DOE over the summer until the end of august. Lets say that she is not ready to come back and wants to use the rest of the days in her car, she can extend her paid leave until November (thereby having a 6 months paid leave from the time she left work). She can still choice to stay home for 4 years and come back to work when her child is 4 years old (however, after November, she will most likely not get paid for the time).</p>
<p>How often does that happen in other business sectors?</p>
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<p>[Time</a> With A Newborn: Maternity Leave Policies Around The World : NPR](<a href=“Time With A Newborn: Maternity Leave Policies Around The World : NPR”>Time With A Newborn: Maternity Leave Policies Around The World : NPR)</p>
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<p>Clearly people working at the DOE are better off than those working for, say, Wal-Mart; but in most of the developed world workers at either place would get more paid parental leave without using any of their sick days. It’s a different societal mentality; and though this is a tangent from the subject of the thread, my point was that a few decades ago none of those countries had those leave policies but they have changed and this is now the new norm. Similarly, just because many workplaces now are not set up to deal with workers who approach their job in a different way than the typical hard-charging, workaholic American style, that does not mean it must evermore be so.</p>
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<p>… no. A job is defined by which way the money goes for work done, not the pace of the work.</p>