An employee is supposed to be an asset to the company that employs them. However, some employees are more like a liability than an asset. Years ago, I became acquainted with an accountant who had a progressive, debilitating disease. I’m just speculating but her medical care likely cost more than $50,000 a year based on the therapy she was prescribed. She left one accounting job for another position with greater responsibility, but that position lasted only a year or two. She never said why she was fired but it may not have been for the reasons she was told. Federal law protects workers from medical discrimination due to conditions like hers. There is a firewall between managers, HR, and medical claims experience. However, she transferred to a relatively small retail company with primarily younger part-time sales associates. The jump in medical expenses after she was hired may not have gone unnoticed.
The purpose of a job interview is a small test to see if applicants are capable of rudimentary social skills needed to perform around others. Suppose you apply for a job as an accountant, and you forget the details of the interview time and must call to reconfirm when to show up. Let’s say you didn’t plan and were late for the interview. Maybe after you arrive it becomes obvious you are the worst-dressed person in the room. Or the team conducting your interview notices you’re fidgeting and easily distracted. You could even be foolish enough to ask about medical coverage explaining you have ADHD. These are all easily noticed red flags that suggest you’re not going to be a good accountant. Except for the ADHD, they are also reasonable excuses to pass on hiring this worker. But what if there were other, more technical ways to screen out bad hires?
Recent technology makes it easier to assess genetic risks earlier, which could make some people unemployable. The following is from the New York Times:
While the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, or GINA, protects workers from being fired over their genetic test results, and the Americans With Disabilities Act protects those with active disabilities, neither law compels an employer to provide accommodations to help mitigate a person’s future health risk.
This could become a problem, as a new type of personalized medicine called polygenic risk scoring becomes increasingly popular. The technology uses DNA to estimate a person’s likelihood of developing a specific disease. Legal and public health scholars worry that as genomic tools advance quickly, our legal frameworks are falling behind — in some cases leaving those who use genetic tests vulnerable to outright firings.
GINA does not allow employers to fire workers whose health costs are likely to rise over time. However, it does not require them to provide accommodation, such as different roles if they are unlikely to be able to do the work. Genetic mutations that predispose someone to serious diseases later are also not protected disabilities in and of themselves. Furthermore, there is a gap between protection workers enjoy. More from NYT:
There also exists a legal dead zone for workers who begin experiencing mild symptoms of a disease, since GINA protects only those in whom a disease has not yet manifested, while the A.D.A. requires accommodations only for those whose disabilities impair major life activities. Thus, if supervisors at a chemical manufacturing facility know of a healthy worker with a high polygenic risk score for a rare lung disease, the employee could be fired immediately upon developing mild shortness of breath, the scholars said. GINA protections could vanish, while the standard A.D.A. protections would not yet apply, leaving the worker to rely on difficult-to-prove legal exceptions to save the job.
Then there are obvious questions about the degree to which employers should be shielded from knowledge they need to better hire workers. Should the firm be kept in the dark that a recent accountant hired is genetically predisposed to develop early onset dementia, and is already experiencing symptoms? Or that an engineer is unlikely to be able to perform at the level needed beyond the short run? When does fairness go too far and become unfair to employers? It’s not an easy question to answer, especially when there are people out there who need a job. I once had to take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality assessment) to see if I had the aptitude to remain an accounting manager. I can imagine firms looking for other tools to better assess workers.
Read more at NYT: Genetic Scores are Booming. But Will Anti-Discrimination Laws Cover Your DNA?