How to Help Disabled Employees Deal with Emergencies

How to Help Disabled Employees Deal with Emergencies

www.businessmanagementdaily.com

To develop contingency plans, employers must know what disabilities their employees face. Normally, the ADA prohibits employers from making inquiries that may reveal an employee’s disability. However, in the wake of 9/11, the EEOC relaxed its rules to allow employers to inquire about disabilities, with the following provisos:

All employees must be questioned about their medical conditions.
The information must be used for emergency planning only.
The information may not be used to make hiring...

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It's the standard conundrum - privacy or safety?

In this case, employers are legally required to ask employees' about their medical conditions and disabilities, and then, to make emergency plans to cover a variety of disaster situations. They have to promise NOT to use the information "to make hiring, firing or promotion decisions."

The NCD publication advises employers to develop emergency plans for each of these kinds of disasters:

Rapid-onset events such as tornadoes and wildfires.

Isolating events in which first responders may be unable to reach people with disabilities. Pandemics requiring quarantine and biological, chemical or nuclear contamination could necessitate sheltering in place.

Power-failure events.

Large-scale events, such as hurricanes or terror attacks, where emergency services may not be available.

So what do you think? Is that how it'll go down? Employers will get peoples' private information about medical conditions and disabilities, and just use the info to spend money on appropriate emergency planning?

Do ya think?

Or is it just another intrusion and excuse for invading our privacy? Like this one?

...Do you trust your employer to buy a generator for a fridge to store your insulin in case of an emergency lockdown? Or do you think knowledge of your diabetes will trigger a strategy to get you fired or force you into quitting instead? ...Do you think your employer will stock up on your anti-psychotics just in case there's a long term quarantine? Or will he choose another route to deal with your problem?

...There are so many questions.






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I think that it's a genuinely good thing and decent intent that they have. But I think that employers are going to use it to discriminate left and right. All sorts of things that they never would've known about now become readily available, and you can bet your bottom dollar they'll use it.

reply to post by AnIntellectualRedneck

...I think that employers are going to use it to discriminate left and right. All sorts of things that they never would've known about now become readily available, and you can bet your bottom dollar they'll use it.

My suspicions exactly. S&

Sucks too - it's a win-win for them, and they're off the hook whatever happens. Tell them, you're screwed from the get-go; don't tell, you're screwed in an emergency.