nawchem
Mon, Dec-25-06, 20:22
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/health/26workplace.html?hp&ex=1167109200&en=de6a52faec8a6305&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Diabetics in the Workplace Confront a Tangle of Laws
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
Published: December 26, 2006 New York Times
MINNEAPOLIS — John Steigauf spent more than a decade fiddling with the innards of those huge United Parcel Service trucks until an icy day two years ago when the company put him on leave from his mechanic’s job. A supervisor escorted him off the premises.
His work was good. He hadn’t socked the boss or embezzled money. It had to do with what was inside him: diabetes.
U.P.S. framed it as a safety issue: Mr. Steigauf’s blood sugar might suddenly plummet while he tested a truck, causing him to slam into someone.
Mr. Steigauf considered it discrimination, a taint that diabetes can carry. “I was regarded as a damaged piece of meat,” he said. “It was like, ‘You’re one of those, and we can’t have one of those.’ ”
With 21 million American diabetics, disputes like this have increasingly rippled through the workplace:
A mortgage loan officer in Oregon was denied permission to eat at her desk to stanch her sugar fluctuations, and eventually was fired.
A Sears lingerie saleswoman in Illinois with nerve damage in her leg quit after being told she could not cut through a stockroom to reach her department.
A worker at a candy company in Wisconsin was fired after asking where he could dispose of his insulin needles.
In each instance, diabetics contend that they are being blocked by their employers from the near-normal lives their doctors say are possible. But the companies say they are struggling, too, with confusion about whether diabetes is a legitimate disability and with concern about whether it is overly expensive, hazardous and disruptive to accommodate the illness.
The debate will probably intensify. The number of diabetics in America swelled by 80 percent in the past decade. Experts say the disease is on its way to becoming a conspicuous fact of life in the nation’s labor force, raising all sorts of issues for workers and managers.
Even an outspoken advocate for diabetics like Fran Carpentier, a Type 1 diabetic and a senior editor at Parade magazine, understands the implications for business. “Knowing what it’s like to live with the disease hour by hour, day by day, I wonder if I owned my own company if I would hire someone with diabetes,” she said. “I’m being bluntly honest. And it kills me to say this.”
Doctors, though, say that with improved medications and methods of self-testing blood sugar, most diabetics can do almost any job if they properly manage their illness. Yet myths about the disease persist, advocates say, leading many companies to shun diabetic employees.
“It’s not all about ignorance, but if I can get rid of ignorance, I can get rid of a lot of discrimination,” said Shereen Arent, the director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association.
Part of the confusion is a byproduct of the disease itself, a capricious illness of elevated, damaging levels of sugar in the blood. Type 1 is a malfunction of the immune system that usually appears in childhood, while the far more prevalent Type 2 is closely associated with obesity and inactivity. Many people with diabetes will face withering complications like blindness, amputations and heart disease. Others will not.
For some, particularly insulin users prone to the abnormal drops in blood sugar known as hypoglycemia, the illness can cause dizziness, fainting or muddled judgment. Doctors, however, say those constitute a tiny number of readily identifiable cases.
Nonetheless, the risk of plunging blood sugars has fueled a longstanding reluctance to employ diabetics in jobs like those of truck driver or police officer, if they are on insulin. Until this summer, the National Fire Protection Association cautioned against making it too easy for even non-insulin-dependent diabetics to become firefighters. Now the association recommends an individual assessment.
Federal law bars diabetics from joining the armed services and prevents diabetics on insulin from becoming commercial pilots.
Innumerable diabetics, though, are engaged in more mundane jobs uninvolved in matters of life and death. For these people, secretaries and factory workers and programmers, a “reasonable accommodation,” like permission to eat at one’s desk or to be excused from fluctuating shifts, can make the difference in whether they can function.
When disputes can’t be resolved, the cases often land in court or before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission, which enforces the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, says diabetes-related complaints have been on the rise, one of the few conditions generally showing an increase in complaints. Diabetes accounts for nearly 5 percent of the 15,000 annual allegations that the commission gets under that act, trailing only back impairment, other orthopedic injuries and depression.
Often the courts are of scant help in bringing clarity. Mr. Steigauf has spent two years trying to thread his way through the disability discrimination law. The federal law can be fuzzy, for it mentions no illness or handicap by name but supplies a legal test under which plaintiffs must usually demonstrate that a “major life activity,” like walking or vision, is “substantially limited.”
Skip to next paragraph
Diabetes
Go to Complete Coverage »
Articles in this series are exploring the widening impact of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic.
This is easy enough for anyone who has lost sight or a limb. But the restrictions of diabetes are often invisible. Diabetics thus can find themselves teetering on a balance beam, needing to prove they are disabled enough to fit under the law but not so impaired that they can’t do a job.
Judges in nearly identical cases have ruled in completely opposite ways, leaving diabetics bewildered and businesses unsure what, if anything, they should do. While some courts, for example, have held that the eating restrictions diabetics face satisfy the substantial limitation, others have disagreed.
“Usually the battle is over that word, ‘substantially,’ ” said Craig A. Crispin, an Oregon employment lawyer. “If you say the person is disabled because of the impact on eating, the other side will say: ‘Hey, look, she’s eating a sandwich. Where’s the disability?’ ”
Seeking Accommodations
The quarrels are as varied as working life: a musician rejected for a cruise ship’s cabaret band, baggage handlers and plane cleaners fired by an airline, a blackjack dealer dismissed by a casino.
The American Diabetes Association fields about 100 calls a month about workplace tussles like these. Many of them revolve around accommodations, though the changes sought tend to be modest: predictable hours, a place to test blood, freedom to snack when sugars get unbalanced.
Companies often cite workplace safety as their paramount concern, though there is little hard evidence to suggest that diabetics are a risk.
In one case in 2002, ConAgra Foods withdrew a job offer to Rudy Rodriguez at a Texas baked bean plant after a physical suggested that his Type 2 diabetes was so out of control that he was a hazard. Mr. Rodriguez had performed fine as an interim laborer, but the examining doctor declared there was nowhere he could safely work “outside of a padded room where he could even then fall and break his neck from dizziness or fainting.”
An appeals court found otherwise and held that ConAgra had violated the law. The case was settled, and Mr. Rodriguez now works for a printer.
“Some people who have a problem with hypoglycemia should not be doing public safety-type jobs,” said John W. Griffin Jr., a lawyer from Texas with Type 2 diabetes who handles discrimination cases. “But I guarantee you that that baked bean factory was not public safety.”
There has been other progress for diabetics: the San Antonio Police Department’s barring of diabetics on insulin was struck down. Insulin-using diabetics in good control of their illness can get private pilot’s licenses.
In the lingerie saleswoman’s case, Sears agreed to a consent decree awarding the woman $150,000 and stipulating that the store train supervisors about disability discrimination.
Employers, however, prevail in a vast majority of cases (many are settled). It is hard even to get lawyers to pursue complaints since prejudice is tricky to prove. Establishing discrimination has become harder since 1999, when the Supreme Court held that if a disability can be corrected with medicine or things like prostheses, it is not necessarily protected. Advocates for the disabled say the ruling warped the intent of Congress.
Ruth Colker, a law professor at Ohio State University who studies disability discrimination, said that very few working people with diabetes now find themselves guarded by the law.
Judges, in fact, have deemed these diabetics not disabled: a Maine store manager who had trouble walking because of poor circulation, and a New York security guard without vision in one eye and declining vision in the other who had four episodes of hypoglycemia in two years.
In some instances, employers have said they took action against an employee because of diabetes, but the court still found that the worker was not disabled and threw out the case.
1 2 3 4 Next Page
Diabetics in the Workplace Confront a Tangle of Laws
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
Published: December 26, 2006 New York Times
MINNEAPOLIS — John Steigauf spent more than a decade fiddling with the innards of those huge United Parcel Service trucks until an icy day two years ago when the company put him on leave from his mechanic’s job. A supervisor escorted him off the premises.
His work was good. He hadn’t socked the boss or embezzled money. It had to do with what was inside him: diabetes.
U.P.S. framed it as a safety issue: Mr. Steigauf’s blood sugar might suddenly plummet while he tested a truck, causing him to slam into someone.
Mr. Steigauf considered it discrimination, a taint that diabetes can carry. “I was regarded as a damaged piece of meat,” he said. “It was like, ‘You’re one of those, and we can’t have one of those.’ ”
With 21 million American diabetics, disputes like this have increasingly rippled through the workplace:
A mortgage loan officer in Oregon was denied permission to eat at her desk to stanch her sugar fluctuations, and eventually was fired.
A Sears lingerie saleswoman in Illinois with nerve damage in her leg quit after being told she could not cut through a stockroom to reach her department.
A worker at a candy company in Wisconsin was fired after asking where he could dispose of his insulin needles.
In each instance, diabetics contend that they are being blocked by their employers from the near-normal lives their doctors say are possible. But the companies say they are struggling, too, with confusion about whether diabetes is a legitimate disability and with concern about whether it is overly expensive, hazardous and disruptive to accommodate the illness.
The debate will probably intensify. The number of diabetics in America swelled by 80 percent in the past decade. Experts say the disease is on its way to becoming a conspicuous fact of life in the nation’s labor force, raising all sorts of issues for workers and managers.
Even an outspoken advocate for diabetics like Fran Carpentier, a Type 1 diabetic and a senior editor at Parade magazine, understands the implications for business. “Knowing what it’s like to live with the disease hour by hour, day by day, I wonder if I owned my own company if I would hire someone with diabetes,” she said. “I’m being bluntly honest. And it kills me to say this.”
Doctors, though, say that with improved medications and methods of self-testing blood sugar, most diabetics can do almost any job if they properly manage their illness. Yet myths about the disease persist, advocates say, leading many companies to shun diabetic employees.
“It’s not all about ignorance, but if I can get rid of ignorance, I can get rid of a lot of discrimination,” said Shereen Arent, the director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association.
Part of the confusion is a byproduct of the disease itself, a capricious illness of elevated, damaging levels of sugar in the blood. Type 1 is a malfunction of the immune system that usually appears in childhood, while the far more prevalent Type 2 is closely associated with obesity and inactivity. Many people with diabetes will face withering complications like blindness, amputations and heart disease. Others will not.
For some, particularly insulin users prone to the abnormal drops in blood sugar known as hypoglycemia, the illness can cause dizziness, fainting or muddled judgment. Doctors, however, say those constitute a tiny number of readily identifiable cases.
Nonetheless, the risk of plunging blood sugars has fueled a longstanding reluctance to employ diabetics in jobs like those of truck driver or police officer, if they are on insulin. Until this summer, the National Fire Protection Association cautioned against making it too easy for even non-insulin-dependent diabetics to become firefighters. Now the association recommends an individual assessment.
Federal law bars diabetics from joining the armed services and prevents diabetics on insulin from becoming commercial pilots.
Innumerable diabetics, though, are engaged in more mundane jobs uninvolved in matters of life and death. For these people, secretaries and factory workers and programmers, a “reasonable accommodation,” like permission to eat at one’s desk or to be excused from fluctuating shifts, can make the difference in whether they can function.
When disputes can’t be resolved, the cases often land in court or before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission, which enforces the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, says diabetes-related complaints have been on the rise, one of the few conditions generally showing an increase in complaints. Diabetes accounts for nearly 5 percent of the 15,000 annual allegations that the commission gets under that act, trailing only back impairment, other orthopedic injuries and depression.
Often the courts are of scant help in bringing clarity. Mr. Steigauf has spent two years trying to thread his way through the disability discrimination law. The federal law can be fuzzy, for it mentions no illness or handicap by name but supplies a legal test under which plaintiffs must usually demonstrate that a “major life activity,” like walking or vision, is “substantially limited.”
Skip to next paragraph
Diabetes
Go to Complete Coverage »
Articles in this series are exploring the widening impact of the Type 2 diabetes epidemic.
This is easy enough for anyone who has lost sight or a limb. But the restrictions of diabetes are often invisible. Diabetics thus can find themselves teetering on a balance beam, needing to prove they are disabled enough to fit under the law but not so impaired that they can’t do a job.
Judges in nearly identical cases have ruled in completely opposite ways, leaving diabetics bewildered and businesses unsure what, if anything, they should do. While some courts, for example, have held that the eating restrictions diabetics face satisfy the substantial limitation, others have disagreed.
“Usually the battle is over that word, ‘substantially,’ ” said Craig A. Crispin, an Oregon employment lawyer. “If you say the person is disabled because of the impact on eating, the other side will say: ‘Hey, look, she’s eating a sandwich. Where’s the disability?’ ”
Seeking Accommodations
The quarrels are as varied as working life: a musician rejected for a cruise ship’s cabaret band, baggage handlers and plane cleaners fired by an airline, a blackjack dealer dismissed by a casino.
The American Diabetes Association fields about 100 calls a month about workplace tussles like these. Many of them revolve around accommodations, though the changes sought tend to be modest: predictable hours, a place to test blood, freedom to snack when sugars get unbalanced.
Companies often cite workplace safety as their paramount concern, though there is little hard evidence to suggest that diabetics are a risk.
In one case in 2002, ConAgra Foods withdrew a job offer to Rudy Rodriguez at a Texas baked bean plant after a physical suggested that his Type 2 diabetes was so out of control that he was a hazard. Mr. Rodriguez had performed fine as an interim laborer, but the examining doctor declared there was nowhere he could safely work “outside of a padded room where he could even then fall and break his neck from dizziness or fainting.”
An appeals court found otherwise and held that ConAgra had violated the law. The case was settled, and Mr. Rodriguez now works for a printer.
“Some people who have a problem with hypoglycemia should not be doing public safety-type jobs,” said John W. Griffin Jr., a lawyer from Texas with Type 2 diabetes who handles discrimination cases. “But I guarantee you that that baked bean factory was not public safety.”
There has been other progress for diabetics: the San Antonio Police Department’s barring of diabetics on insulin was struck down. Insulin-using diabetics in good control of their illness can get private pilot’s licenses.
In the lingerie saleswoman’s case, Sears agreed to a consent decree awarding the woman $150,000 and stipulating that the store train supervisors about disability discrimination.
Employers, however, prevail in a vast majority of cases (many are settled). It is hard even to get lawyers to pursue complaints since prejudice is tricky to prove. Establishing discrimination has become harder since 1999, when the Supreme Court held that if a disability can be corrected with medicine or things like prostheses, it is not necessarily protected. Advocates for the disabled say the ruling warped the intent of Congress.
Ruth Colker, a law professor at Ohio State University who studies disability discrimination, said that very few working people with diabetes now find themselves guarded by the law.
Judges, in fact, have deemed these diabetics not disabled: a Maine store manager who had trouble walking because of poor circulation, and a New York security guard without vision in one eye and declining vision in the other who had four episodes of hypoglycemia in two years.
In some instances, employers have said they took action against an employee because of diabetes, but the court still found that the worker was not disabled and threw out the case.
1 2 3 4 Next Page