I work for the North America Immigration Law Group/WeGreened network of companies and the way the owners treat my disabled coworkers is really gross.
As some backstory, we’ve been forming a union for a couple years now and recently had what’s called a “unit hearing.” Basically, this means that lawyers and the government call you in to testify about what your job is. You get subpoenaed to testify so you’re legally unable to refuse to go.
Anyways, one of my coworkers gets subpoenaed to the hearing. So she goes – all good, right? Wrong. Ends up, she’s on the spectrum and had arranged with her training manager to get flexible deadlines for her work. This is a reasonable accommodation for her disability and doesn’t hurt the company at all, but she had only been granted this accommodation by her direct supervisor and hadn’t gone to HR about it (precisely because she was afraid of discrimination if she told people outside of her team).
So one of the company’s owners sees her at the hearing (something she couldn’t refuse to go to) and starts examining her deadlines. He sees that her deadlines are different than other peoples and confronts her one on one. He grills her about her deadlines and then personally revokes her disability accommodations. Obviously, this is illegal (violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act), but he doesn’t care. And now she can’t do her job and has to take an extended medical leave while she hires a lawyer and tries to sort everything out. If she didn’t have family support, she could quite literally be homeless right now because her disability limits the kinds of jobs that she’s able to take.
Another one of my co-workers was subpoenaed to testify but doesn’t have quite the same job, so there aren’t deadlines for the bosses to examine. Even before she testified, both of the company’s owners identified her as a union supporter and were clogging up her DMs, taking away her assistant (which people in her position typically have), and increasing her workload. After she testifies, the owners keep interrogating her about her job. Eventually, all this puts her on medical leave because, between not having an assistant and being constantly harassed by the bosses, the stress from work gives her a mental breakdown. So during her leave, she gets a lawyer and works out disability accommodations with HR. After these accommodations were worked out, the HR manager who set them up was dismissed or quit, and she was told that she could not have those accommodations anymore. My co-worker was then put on an “indefinite suspension” the day she was supposed to return to office, and the company ultimately terminated her for downloading files that she couldn’t have done her job without.
These aren’t the only stories I could share but I’ll leave it here for now. I can post more in the comments or do a follow-up post or something if people want.
TL;DR: My bosses used my co-workers’ disabilities as weapons to punish them for testifying in response to subpoenas.
Edit: minor correction