Real jobs for real people

The Wall Street Journal runs an extended feature on an employment program at Walgreen’s for people with disabilities.

The headline: “Erasing ‘Un’ from “Unemployable’: Walgreen program trains the disabled to take on regular wage-paying jobs”

Highlighted is 18-year-old Harrison Mullinax, who has autism.

“Mr. Mullinax works eight hours a day at a new Walgreen Co. distribution center, where he wields a bar-code scanner, checking in boxes of merchandise bound for the company’s drugstores. From his paycheck, he tithes to his church and sometimes treats his mother to dinner at Kenny’s, a local buffet restaurant. ‘It answered a prayer,’ says Mr. Mullinax’s mother….”

The distribution center employs 264 people, more than 40 percent of whom have various disabilities, and is 20 percent more efficient than the company’s older facilities.

“… an innovative program at the distribution center [in Anderson, S.C.] is offering jobs to people with mental and physical disabilities of a nature that has frequently deemed them ‘unemployable,’ while saving Walgreen money through automation.”

” … executives at Walgreen and the social-services agencies working with it believe the company’s program has a larger number of disabled employees, doing more-sophisticated work, than is typically available to people with mental and physical challenges. “

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Is the workplace discriminating against parents?

Back in the day when my children were tiny, I worked 60-hour weeks as a senior editor at the LA Times Magazine. I depended heavily on the kindness of babysitters and preschool teachers, but the wheels pretty much stayed on the bus until Margaret was diagnosed with leukemia.

After that, it quickly became clear that my husband and I couldn’t manage two kids (one with both an intellectual disability and a chronic life-threatening illness) AND two high-powered jobs. If our family was going to survive, one of the jobs had to go. I left the Times -- a great loss for me, but one that seemed unavoidable.

Now that almost 20 years have passed, I often wonder whether the choices are less stark for parents who find themselves in similar circumstances today. Job or family? Family or job? Do people have to choose?

An in-depth story in today’s New York Times Magazine attempts to answer that question – and I guess I’m not surprised to learn things haven’t changed all that much for families despite the passage of landmark federal legislation. Or rather, things are much the same but a lot more lawyers are involved.

Writer Eyal Press introduces us to a woman who lost her job after her baby was born 16 weeks early, a man who was denied a request for time off to care for his ill wife and child, and a woman who was terminated after requesting a different work schedule so she could attend her son's therapy sessions. He traces lawsuit after lawsuit, discussing the issues in light of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.

Here’s how the headline frames the debate: “Do workers have a fundamental right to care for the families?” and “The latest front in the job-discrimination battle.”