Page 71 - An Indispensible Resource for Being a Credible Activist

Your job is to influence your company’s decision makers to choose to operate within
legal compliance. This is your job because you are a credible activist, which means you take
employment laws seriously, you intend to abide by them, you want to work for a company
that abides by them and takes them seriously, and you want to minimize your own personal
liability as well as any liability exposure for the company.
As with business leaders who are not impressed with concerns about personal or com-
pany liability, you may need to present the sobering data on injuries that include permanent
disabilities and deaths as well as multimillion-dollar fines given to various companies by
OSHA each year. OSHA, National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and
state Division of Safety and Health (DOSH) offices often have compelling educational mate-
rials, which may help make your case. You may also visit their Web sites to see what can
be downloaded or requested via the mail.
Another excellent resource for HR professionals is the Job Accommodation Network
4
(JAN) at http://www.jan.wvu.edu/. There is a great deal of information about the free
technical assistance JAN provides to employers of every type regarding every possible issue
related to ADA: accommodation, avoiding retaliation, cost/benefit analyses, and specific
information on every type of disability covered by the ADA. JAN’s Web site is extremely
comprehensive, with accommodation ideas for nearly every disability, and is organized in a
completely user-friendly manner. You can search by disability or by profession, and go to
many other options for resource information from consultants who help with devices as
accommodations to support groups to other relevant laws for persons with disabilities. You
will notice that their informational material is so well cross-referenced that it may seem
repetitive as you go through it. This is intentional, as the purpose is to make the material as
easily accessible as possible.
When you are presenting information to your executive leadership and/or other deci-
sion makers and you know you have limited time during which to be persuasive or influen-
tial, you will want to provide them with information that is extremely user-friendly, gets to
the point, and is sufficiently persuasive. Similarly, JAN, SHRM, and companies that provide
important information for HR professionals know that your time is often limited and you
often need the same kind of user-friendly convenience.
If an employee raises a safety concern and is then retaliated against, that employee may
file an OSHA 11c retaliation complaint against the company, which OSHA will then investigate.
The HR Tool entitled “Sample Memo Concerning OSHA’s Prohibition against Retaliation,” at
the end of the chapter, on pages 63–64, is an example of how to address possible retaliation
under OSHA.

ADDRESSING ADA AND ADAAA COMPLIANCE

As with EEO and workplace safety laws, some business leaders are simply unaware of
the personal liability exposure they have if they don’t take these laws seriously, while oth-
ers stubbornly resist these laws for misguided personal and/or financial reasons. An exam-
ple of how to handle this situation is shown in the HR Tool entitled “Sample Memo
Concerning Compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act,” on pages 65–66. Also,
the ADA, in light of recent changes, is now called the ADAAA: Americans with Disabilities

54 The H R Toolkit