Hey all, so I wanted to pose a situation and ask for input from those who may have gone through similar. I’m going to endeavor to keep the story general as otherwise it would get incredibly long with the details included.
I have a disability and I started a new job about 6 months ago at the aforementioned employer. My disability is generally invisible and I have a good bit of experience hiding it well enough that nobody (at work) knows about it. I haven’t ever even had to formally request any sort of accommodations for it (in over 10 years throughout multiple companies).
I encountered an issue less than two weeks into this job that forced me to bring up an informal accommodation request to management. They did not place weight on it at the time and instead chose to ignore it. For ~4 months following that, I kept bringing it up to different management/HR (re-orgs and such). Every time it was brought up, it was tossed aside; maybe it wasn’t outright ignored, but nothing was done about it. It took this long because I’d give whoever it was a good bit of time (as well as follow-ups) to take action on what I said before taking the next step.
For some reason at the end of this ~4 months or so, I had some informal benefits/perks revoked that were still available to my co-workers. When I brought this up to management, nobody was willing to answer my question directly – it was always either ignored, “someone else made that decision”, or “that’s normal”.
After enough waiting around for management/HR to help, I filed a formal request with our accommodations department. To summarize a lengthy sub-story, the woman assigned to my case was so aggressive and incompetent that I gave up working with her.
I finally had enough of the situation as I could no longer actually perform work and took leave. Throughout my leave, I have been communicating with both management and HR, trying to resolve the various major contributing factors to me taking leave in the first place. HR forced management to restore one of the benefits they revoked (though it’s still not fully restored).
I then pressed HR over the course of those same 2-3 weeks for a resolution to remaining major aspects of what caused me to take leave in the first place as they had taken point on communicating with me. I have made it clear to them that the first step in resolving this situation is for them to answer questions in order for things to move forward. They refuse, stating that they “believe they’ve answered all of my questions” and are “more than willing” to set up a time to discuss things with me in person upon my return. They also refuse to reply to any more of my emails while I’m on leave.
As I have tried multiple times to get HR to work with me on setting things straight and they keep refusing to do so, I told them my next step is to file a complaint with the EEOC.
I ask those who got this far: have you seen similar before? If so, how did it end up/how was it resolved?