When I first became disabled and was deluding myself into thinking that by working a couple hours when I was awake at 3 AM, a couple hours at 9 AM, a couple hours at 3 PM, a couple hours at 9 PM, I could work 8 hours a day, I did look into jobs that I thought should be able to be done via telecommute. Unfortunately, what I got from local employers was arguments for why it would not work for me to be somewhere other than sitting at a desk where they could see me and be sure that I was actually working. Even the local agency that helps the disabled find jobs refused to let me work via e-mail/fax/phone; you know you’re in trouble when a placement agency for the disabled sarcastically wishes you good luck in finding a job!
Every time someone said to me "I know someone who works at home", I asked them to make inquiries for me. OK, you know for a fact that XYZ Company hires people to process paperwork at home, find out how I apply for such a job, name and phone number of the person I should call. And every single time, they would come back to me with the information that this turned out to be a special accommodation for a valuable long-time employee that the company didn’t want to lose entirely when either health issues or caregiving responsibilities required them to stay home for an extended period. At the very least, I would have to work in their office for 6 months or a year before they’d consider letting me work at home; in many cases, I’d have to work there for 10 or 20 years, as Cousin Susie did, and hope that they loved me as much as they loved Susie. It’s great that some companies offer that to long-time employees, but it doesn’t help those of us who have health problems NOW and need to work from home from the first day. And even though they’d seen that it was possible for the job to be done from home, none of them were interested in hiring someone to work from home on a permanent basis; one of the people who was working from home had a terminal illness, so she specifically asked her supervisor about hiring me to fill her job when she could no longer work, and they made it quite clear that they did not see any cost-benefit to the company, and her replacement would work in the office, end of discussion.
Then there were the jobs advertised as "work at home!!!", which turned out to mean "you’re going to be out of your home 40 hours a week at meetings or sales calls, but you can write up your paperwork at home". Again, for someone who needed to stay mostly horizontal due to fainting spells, and doesn’t drive, that was not the sort of "work at home" that suited my needs.
There are plenty of work at home scams, but if you look into it, you find that there are very few legitimate work at home jobs that in fact mean "100% at home". It wasn’t for lack of trying that I was still unemployed when my Unemployment ran out, but that the type of job that my health required at that time simply wasn’t available. ADA does not require employers to offer a work at home option, and, in fact, there are some court decisions that say that it is very difficult for those judges to imagine any sort of job that could be done 100% from home without occasionally needing to go to the office for some reason. (Unfortunately, the courts are not consistent on this issue: according to the ADA decisions, what I need goes beyond "reasonable accommodation" and I cannot require an employer to provide it, therefore, I am too disabled to work under ADA, but the SSDI judge thinks some employer "should be happy" to accommodate me "because of my experience and qualifications", therefore, I am not disabled under his personal definition, because he imagines this is an ideal world where employers will do more than is legally required of them, even for a brand-new employee.)
Since no one was willing to hire me on my terms, I hired myself. I started my own business in which all the office equipment, all the office files, all the everything is, in fact, 100% in my home. Since I’m the boss, I don’t get in trouble when I need to work lying in bed instead of at a desk so I won’t pass out while doing it, or when I need to interrupt a project to take a two-hour nap, or when I have to take the laptop into the bathroom for an hour-long bout of digestive distress that would otherwise cause me to miss the deadline.
Ironically, after having multiple law firms in town question "if you’re working from home, how do we know you’re working as many hours as we’re paying you for?", I found that lawyers in other cities were perfectly willing to trust me not to pad the bills ... and they were paying far more per hour to hire me as a freelance independent contractor than I would have been paid as a part-time employee! Unfortunately, since I’m now mostly home-bound, I can no longer do the sort of paralegal work that the out-of-town lawyers were hiring me for, and I’m still running into the argument from the local firms that they will not hire me to review/summarize/index documents working from home, because they somehow think it can only be done efficiently in their office.
The reason I’m forced to beg for Disability benefits is because I desperately want to work doing the job I loved and did for decades, but no one wants to hire me because I cannot do the job in the same way as a healthy employee (i.e., sitting at a desk in their office), and ADA doesn’t give me the ammunition I need to force them to let me work at home.
Somewhere, there may be an open-minded lawyer who can see the cost savings to having me pay for my own office space, my own computer, my own printer and copier supplies ... but I haven’t found him yet. I’ve called around town, I’ve written letters, I’ve put an expensive ad in the legal community’s newspaper, I’ve put ads on legal websites, and I’ve put up a website of my own. Now I’m putting the cost benefits in my blog, for just one more attempt at finding employment as a paralegal reviewing records at home.
Before you condemn me for not having a "real job", why don’t you make some phone calls and see if you can find someone in your social circle willing to hire me? If you can, I’ll have a real job with assured minimum hours, and an income sufficient to disqualify me from SSDI benefits. But I’m betting that you’ll hear the same thing I did, that "100% work at home" simply isn’t acceptable to employers. Maybe if my detractors do their best to find me a job I can do within my limitations, they’ll find out the hard way that the work world isn’t as Utopian as they think it should be when it comes to hiring the disabled. When the government told employers that it’s illegal to discriminate against people due to disability, they simply found other reasons instead; for years, they did it to people of color, and to women, and to people of alternate sexual orientations – they already have a whole long list of excuses they can use that have nothing to do with something that gives you grounds to sue for discrimination. (The simplest being "both candidates were equally qualified, but I could only hire one, and you lost the coin toss.")
It’s all very well and good to tell me that you can imagine a situation in which I could work at home, but when the imaginary isn’t reflected in the real world, it doesn’t do me a bit of good. What I’m doing now is as best as I can do under the circumstances, and will continue to be the best I can do until someone offers me a real job (not a hypothetical one). "Why don’t you do X?" means nothing if there’s not an actual employer willing to go along with the idea.
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