Discussion Essay Questions 1

An employer is required to provide reasonable accommodations for a disabled worker so long as it does not put undue hardship upon the employer. Reasonable accommodations refer to changes that are implemented either to the workplace environment or to the position occupied by the disabled worker. So long as the disabled worker is still qualified to do the job, the employer, under the ADA, has to accommodate the worker’s disability—so long, of course, as it does not cause the employer undue hardship (Repa, 2018).

In some cases, this has made it easier for individuals with disabilities to go to work. For example, an elderly manager who had difficulty walking and standing could not use a cart to get around in, paid for by the company—and since there were handicap access ramps and doors in the facility already this was not an undue hardship on the employer. This would be an example the ADA actually helping disabled workers get back to work (ODEP, 2009).

In other cases, the opposite has proven true. Employers have been able to show that making big changes to a workplace or a position would cause the company undue hardship—which means the disabled worker now has to look elsewhere and is likely to get turned down and discouraged the longer the search goes on.

References

ODEP. (2009). Accommodation and compliance series. Retrieved from https://askjan.org/Erguide/ErGuide.pdf

Repa, B. (2018). Your right to a reasonable accommodation. Retrieved from https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-rights-book/chapter7-8.html

2

Upside-down welfarism is what happens when those with the least amount of need get the most handouts from the state, while those with the most need receive the least handouts from the government (Walz, 1973; Blanck, 2000). An example of this would be the TARP bailouts following the Great Economic Crisis of 2008, when banks went bust and the federal government bailed them out, while millions of ordinary people lost their homes and got nothing from the government in terms of assistance.

The U.S. essentially socialized the losses (taxpayers funded the bailout) and privatized the gains (banks got to keep whatever profits they made with their speculative lending practices) and the middle and lower classes got the shaft. Another example would be the fact that corporations get to write off so much when they do their taxes that they end up paying very little into the coffers of the government—at least in terms of what they make; while those lower down on the totem pole—the lower class workers, have to pay a significant chunk of their paycheck into the income tax. The lower classes get taxed, and the corporations get corporate welfare—subsidies, tax loopholes, and so on.

References

Blanck, P. (2000). Employment, disability, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Northwestern University Press.

Walz, T. (1973). The upside down welfare state. Elwood Printing.

As the Governance and Social Development Resource Center (2012) points out, there are many “economic benefits of adopting a disability-inclusive approach” to business (p. 4). Businesses in the local economy can receive incentives, tax breaks and other subsidies by making their establishments more accommodating to disabled persons.
Inclusivity has its perks in the modern development of cities and locales that are being revived to help attract new talent to regions where business is prospering. The local economy can thus provide more resources to disabled people by granting them more access to the community. As King (2011) notes, state and local policy makers are actively seeking ways to incorporate the disabled community into the local economy in ways that will benefit both.