Posted on 12/03/2014 12:03:46 PM PST by TurboZamboni
Employers are only allowed to exist to provide paychecks and healthcare.
It’s in the new penumbra.
This is why "fairness" is for kids in the schoolyard and referees in artificial situations, and not for adults. Every time someone is treated "fairly" because of government intervention, someone else gets hosed. But they're invisible, so nobody cares.
Pregnancy isn't a disability. It's the result of a purely voluntary activity. [If you want to allow a disability exemption for cases where rape charges are filed, I'm not going to quibble about that.]
Well, I am a senior woman who knows nothing about football except that it’s played with the ball that has points on it. Anyway, I think I should be allowed to play in the NFL. It’s just not fair to keep me away from all of that money just because I am not physically able to do the job.
But I am not interested in your academic exercises, even if in your pedantic little lecture you are laughably wrong.
Disability claims are reviewed precisely because not all claims are honored "regardless of the source of that inability." If I claim that: "My boss frightens me to the point that I am no longer able to function," I will not receive an insurance payout from a disability claim, nor will I be given a "reasonable accommodation" as a matter of law, even though my "disability" may be attested to by all of the psychologists and psychiatrists in the profession.
Arbitrary limiting conditions do constitute disability for the purposes of law. That is why the Court has agreed to the case, and why they care even less about your so-called definition of disability than I do.
I don’t understand this either. I think a big part of the case is that they make these accommodations to other employees who become temporarily disabled. Did you have to get hurt on the job, or do they help you out if you broke your leg on your ski vacation - I don’t know the answer to that.
But if they do that, it seems silly they wouldn’t have worked with this woman, rather than go through years of litigation, they could have paid her to stay home the entire 9 months, it wouldn’t have cost nearly what they’ve paid in legal fees.
So, I don’t know what they are thinking, that they’ll be plagued with a million pregnant employees? If you hire women of that age you need to be prepared for that.
I remember that case. I think the company was the huge “Johnson Controls” no?
“I find it hard to believe in the life of UPS they’ve never had a pregnant driver before.”
Good point.
OH please, don’t go there, clearly that would be fraud. People commit fraud all the time, but we must not adopt a standard that says all acts are fraudulent or we may as well go through ourselves in the sea right now.
I’m close, by Sandy Hook, NJ, come over and we’ll leap together!
“By not allowing some leeway for women who are pregnant, are we encouraging abortion?.....”
Clearly yes.
I have used short term disability from two companies Verizon and IBM for my two surgeries (UPP and gall bladder removal). I have also worked with women who used STD while working on the same project(s). While I do not know the specifics of each pregnancy, the three women (2 at IBM and 1 at Verizon) took short term disability for their pregnancy and all did so before their delivery.
While it is possible that SOME STD plans might exclude coverage for pregnancy, that is not true in all cases. My personal observations of the STD programs in the real world did not. You will note that these are not “academic exercise”, they are real world observations.
I will remind you that the original comment / recommendation was for the company to offer the option to the employees for short term disability to cover the time the employee was out. I have seen such options work for others.
If you disagree, that is fine. It is your opinion and you are certainly entitled to disagree.
It has nothing to do with fraud. It has to do with committing a voluntary act, and then claiming you have become “disabled” by doing so.
Your definition of disability was purely academic, and has nothing to do with the legal definition. Please do try to at least keep up with your own posts.
What a company offers as a matter of policy or as part of a collective bargaining agreement, or under proper Constitutionally valid law, is entirely an issue settled under the terms upon which the employee accepted an employment offer to begin with. I have no problem with those.
I do have a problem with calling pregnancy a "disability." No one has previously made this argument under law. As a matter of fact, the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed in 1993, three years after the Americans With Disabilities Act. In neither law is pregnancy considered a disability, and indeed, if the ADA had considered pregnancy a "disabling" condition, there would have been no cause for enacting the FMLA AT ALL.
At the time, Rush Limbaugh was blasted for proclaiming that the next step was to require paid medical leave for pregnancy as a matter of law.
Of course he was denounced as a right-wing bigot who was clearly out of his mind for believing any such thing was on the table.
As usual, it appears he was prescient: that is exactly where we are going.
We have three [now grown] children. My wife and I made considerable financial sacrifices for her to begin her career as a full-time mom over the ten year period before all of our children where in first grade. It would have been lovely for her to have been able to charge three years of that time to her employer, but we didn't have kids for the money and we didn't expect other people to pick up the tab for our reproductive decisions.
Benefits negotiated with employers are compensation and are part of the deal where we all trade some of our precious mortality for the filthy lucre. Benefits extracted from employers at the point of a gun by federal bureaucrats, politicians, and "justices" are evil and conservatives should not be supporting them.
Would businesses start requiring people to refrain from sex so as to not ‘accidentally’ become pregnant?
Or are you saying that people who work shouldn’t have sex unless there’s someone else that would take care of the baby should a pregnancy arise?
I agree with the latter to some degree. But requiring people to not have sex is regrettable.
UPS should lay her off and let her collect unemployment. Why should they be stuck with a future employment commitment for someone because “Surprise, I’m pregnant” “I need a break”. “It’s your job to make me happy!”
It's 2014. Nobody needs to be pregnant unless they want to be. [And actually, with very rare exceptions, that's always been true.]
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