What do you do when your employee asks permission to leave work early for a week to care for her disabled son? Do you grant it? Do you reject it out of hand? Hopefully you ask a few more questions and see what you can do to address the situation at hand. What if you […]
Can You Make Your Employees Get Flu Shots?
Flu season is coming. If you work for a health care institution or organization that could be of particular concern. Mandatory vaccination programs are very common in the healthcare industry. Is it legal? Usually, yes. Some states might even require you to offer the vaccine. But even a mandatory flu shot (or other vaccination) may […]
Employees Have a Right NOT to Pray
We live in a country that affords us many individual freedoms, among them the right to observe the religion of our choice (subject to some reasonable limits). When a job requirement interferes with a sincerely held religious belief an employer must at least try to provide a reasonable accommodation. Generally speaking, employers must not discriminate […]
How Not to Respond to a Reasonable Accommodation Request
You probably already know that the ADA (and the ADAAA) protects qualified individuals with disabilities from discrimination. Title I applies to the workplace. There’s more though. Built into the definition of discrimination is failure to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in hiring and during employment. In other words, Title I of the […]
When is a Reasonable Accommodation Not Reasonable?
Most employers know they have to reasonably accommodate qualified applicants’ and employees’ disabilities. Not all employers know that they also have to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious practices. That doesn’t mean you have to grant every request for an accommodation, however. The key word here is reasonable. So what is a reasonable accommodation, and what determines […]