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Be honest. How much do you really know about ADA mandated accommodation compliance?
Probably, you’re aware that you can’t fire someone for being deaf, and that pregnancy is not a dismissible offense. You’re smart and aware, whether from a sense of duty towards human dignity, or from a strong desire to not be turned upside down to have a settlement shaken out of your pockets.
I hope.
But as surely as you cannot do without legal counsel to advise you re: taking care of employees and customers, you could also use a little more education on the subject.
I certainly did. Who was going to tell me that my reason for taking a pill with my mac n’ cheese qualified as a bona fide disability? Whoever they were, they probably could have let Starbucks know too.
CBS News reports the cantankerous coffee corporation as facing a lawsuit over its dairy alternative options. Per their summation:
“California residents Maria Bollinger, Dawn Miller and Shunda Smith filed a lawsuit earlier this month in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, alleging the coffee giant discriminated against customers with lactose allergies by charging them an extra fee for nondairy alternatives to its coffee-based drinks and other beverages.”
The article continues,
“Lactose intolerance, which affects 30 million to 50 million Americans, qualifies as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The plaintiffs claim that by charging extra for plant-based milks in their beverages, Starbucks violated their rights under the ADA and California Unruh Civil Rights Act, a law that bars businesses from discriminating against residents of the state on the basis of age, race, sex, disability and other criteria.”
Can I bring us back to 2017 with a ‘Mind Blown’ gif, or is that too far?
But this is the thing about some of the compliances that seem ridiculous to people who don’t need them—they’re there to keep up a wall against further encroachment.
To be totally real, despite my surprise at the genuine governmental legitimacy of this disability, lactose intolerance can really be intolerable. A glass of milk without my off-brand Lactaid could mean days of intense pain, dehydration from diarrhea, and a severely reduced capacity for ‘holding it’. Anything that can put you on the floor in a biohazardous puddle if you aren’t careful is for real, and the relative ease of personal responsibility regarding what one consumes doesn’t make it less so.
Now that we can consider dairy-free options as accommodating people with a disability, as opposed to just providing a vegan choice, the proposed lawsuit is at least backed by a little more perspective.
And more importantly, there’s a moral to the story. Legally speaking you might be discriminating against people in a way that you don’t even realize with how you run your business. Whether that be lack of a downstairs meeting room in a building with no elevator, or a less-than-readable color scheme on your website, it’s something to attempt to account for for certain.
Even if it’s an imposition to hire sensitivity readers, AND lawyers, AND architects, AND…from the getgo, you’ve still got a legal responsibility to get your bases covered—even if it takes the problem cropping up in the first place to show you the weak spots that need reinforcing.
If you don’t get with it, you might end up in hot water. So wake up and smell the coffee.
