Posted on 07/05/2011 3:49:20 PM PDT by redreno
Clark County commissioners approved Tuesday the payment of $150,000 to settle a lawsuit by a former University Medical Center data technician diagnosed with claustrophobia, a condition that arose when she was forced to work in a cubicle.
Jayne Feshold was a data technician hired by the county-run hospital in 1999. Her suit says she "worked without incident" until May 2007. Then the hospital's medical records department was moved to a new building and she was assigned to work in an area "consisting of a small cubicle workspace instead of a more open environment."
(Excerpt) Read more at lasvegassun.com ...
And people wonder why companies don't want to hire people in America...
I had one customer, they had about 150 people in a small room. Each employee had about 30 inches of desk space to work. Just enough for a keyboard and a mouse.
They couldn’t figure out why they had a high turnover rate.
There was this 1 company near the international airport years ago that my company sent me to to fetch the contracts of a building lease and it had 50 employees in this one room which I could term the men’s room.
There was this dark negativity in the air, and the looks on the faces of the employees were one of despair. The president of the company was some jerk Bangladeshi guy and by reputation, the highest turnover rate in the area. they were always posting ads on Craigslist...EVERY DAY.
The room couldn’t be all that little in order to get 150 souls in there side by side but yeah, that’s about 6 inches more per person than at the average dining table. Hey, they should at least have sprung for trackballs.
Hell for a claustrophobe, heaven for a claustrophile.
On top of it they had all of their ‘employees’ set up as 1099 contractors. Of course they didn’t meet ANY of the requirements to be 1099 but the owner didn’t want to pay taxes.
There are some really crappy bosses out there.
Not challenging your statement, but isn’t it reasonable there are degrees of phobias as with most things?
Some people have extreme, incapacitating claustrophobia and others have a somewhat milder version?
It’s ironic when a medical facility, which probably would have been more than glad to have her for treatment as a mental patient, denies reasonable accommodation in the presence of such things. Such denials are SOP for facilities that are faced with accommodation requests they consider a nuisance — and the facility had already demonstrated that it could (what was the cost of the larger office? was it exorbitant?). They are dares “so sue us.” She did. A medical facility couldn’t find any doctors to put the lie to her claim? Unless you’ve lived it or scientifically studied it don’t try to define it.
You’re probably right...phobias affect people differently. I think what irritates me is the idea of trying to accomodate all of those phobias in varying degrees under the ADA. Who would ever lose a demand for accomodation?
“Some people have extreme, incapacitating claustrophobia and others have a somewhat milder version?:
Abdo-lutely! I have fairly mild claustrophobia. But don’t shut the door on me in a small room! My Doc’s nurses know to leave the examination room door open. Yeah,,, it’s irrational. I put large sliding glass doors in all the rooms on my main floor,,, except the bathroom. I once did a remodel job for a gal that had it so bad, that I had to install sliding doors within her condo.
man they nailed that movie
Obviously, they didn't read "Peopleware". When working space drops under 46 sq ft per employee, the noise density in the environment becomes an overwhelming distraction and killer of productivity. It takes about 20 minutes to get into the "flow" state when doing a task. An interruption every 15 minutes guarantees destroyed productivity. Controlling phone interruptions and having a door to close makes a huge difference.
I’ve had patients that have this fear and insist we leave the door open. But then we run into HIPPA concerns, because the patient can hear our other patients. And some of the claustrophobic patients also have paranoia. They WANT to hear what we are saying about THEM. We can’t win!
Their motivational strategy included a lot of yelling.
I believe the idea (and yes, there have been a lot of egregious abuses of the ADA, such as public places where there were always personnel present to help handicapped visitors get around, but they were illogically forced by Uncle Sam to put in expensive special equipment anyhow) is that the cost or effort of the work accommodation should not be exorbitant or prevent any necessary job feature from being carried out. So if you have a bad back, you won’t get an accommodation in a ditch digger job. It would apply to H1B’s and green card holders as well as US citizens.
They don’t worry about me! I have such bad tinnitus, that I can’t hear people speaking directly to me at normal levels!
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