Employees with an injury or medical condition that prevents them from doing  parts of their job ought to consider asking for help  from their co-workers  first before they talk to management about how to accommodate that medical condition or injury.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and most parallel state laws, a disabled employee and their employer are supposed to engage in an “informal interactive process” to see if the employee’s disability can be reasonably accommodated. The process is supposed to be flexible.

In reality often times the interactive process can be an adversarial process where legal counsel for the employer,  HR,  employee health and risk management bureaucrats attempt to force working people to fill out complicated paperwork and create a paper trail justifying terminating an employee.

But if an employee can work with a co-worker or co-workers to shift and trade tasks that they can’t do because of a disability, then the employee has accommodated their own disability without having to deal with a squad of paper pushers who know little about how an employee actually does their job.

The other thing an employee does when they work with their co-workers to accommodate their own disability without interference from management is that they engage in what is called a “protected concerted” activity. So in addition to having legal protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the employee has protections under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as would  their co-workers.

Employees are faced with judges and government agencies who are increasingly sympathetic to management. But workers are re-discovering the power of concerted action. New York taxi drivers struck in protest of President Trump’s proposed Muslim Ban. Workers at Comcast walked out of work in protest of this policy as well.

I realize that many of my prospective and current clients may support Donald Trump and his policies. But regardless of your political views you can still ask for and provide mutual aid and support from your co-workers if you or one of them has a disability that keeps you or them from doing certain tasks on the job. This idea of mutual aid and support for co-workers on the job has long been an important part of workplace rights and will probably grow increasingly important and as courts and government agencies become increasingly supportive of management.