It may be safer to stay on disability pension than attempt to meet job performance standards

Depression can make employment impossible

The Human Rights case of Warren McConnell v The Fredericton Daily Gleaner highlights the danger of attempting to work when you have a disability. The Fredericton Daily Gleaner took a hard nosed business approach to a man’s disability and apparently managed him out of the firm.

It also shows the anti-disability bias in the Canadian press who misrepresented McConnell as a suicidal person who was hired by a kindly employer and fired for being non-productive. As usual, if you read the story in the papers they got it wrong.

Warren McConnell was a long term employee of the Daily Gleaner for 34 years. “On June 10, 2002 the complainant was terminated from his 34 year employment with the respondent.”

Prior to that and after 29 years of employment, Mr. McConnell became depressed and was hospitalized. He returned to work but had to go back to the hospital twice in 2000 when he became depressed and suicidal.

After more than a year on disability, McConnell’s long term disability carrier and employer would put pressure on him to return to work.  The work was a lower skilled job that supposedly matched his diminished capacity. Employees themselves often feel compelled to resume work.

Unwisely, as the facts proved, McConnell went back to work. However, his depression was not “cured.” He could not function in the work environment. That allowed his employer to set the man up for dismissal for non-performance.  As is often the case, the man lost his long term disability benefits because he was “fired”.

“In the new position he failed to bring in sufficient new subscriptions, made mistakes and missed meetings and deadlines. The publisher engaged in an eight month effort to manage him, but McConnell became increasingly negative, culminating in his proclaiming telemarketing, the area he supervised, a waste of time. The company terminated him, offering a 12-month package. Financial Post

The New Brunswick Human Rights Commission agreed with the employer. “The board of inquiry agreed with the employer, and his poor productivity was not linked to depression.”  The Province

The board’s ruling is predictable. Courts have a hard time understanding depression. During the human rights appeal process, Mr. McConnell continued to be depressed. He didn’t respond to his lawyers, the board or even his doctors. That made McConnell an obvious belligerent in the eyes of people who do not understand or have compassion for mental disability.

People with mental disabilities can and are hard to live with and hard to work with but that does not diminish the reality of their disability. Trying to force McConnell back into the work environment with its emphasis on performance and personal interaction was a disaster.

The fact that McConnell couldn’t negotiate the legal system is no wonder.If he was depressed, McConnell would not be able to face even the most mundane of daily decisions let alone being “smart” for lawyers and judges.

The Canadian penchant for forcing the disabled to fight discrimination battles means few of those battles are winnable. In the US, EEOC lawyers carry the load and sue the employer which is humane and logical.

People with emotional, physical or mental disabilities should not return to work until they are totally healed. Accepting downgraded employment where the employer can fire you on performance standards is a set-up to getting you off long-term-disability.

There are enough court cases to document that employers willingly take people back after heart attacks or depression only to fire them within 12 months.

Stay on long term disability. In Canada it’s safer.

Media bias

Canwest and the Financial Post carried the negative and pro-employer legal opinion  of Lang Michener Disability is no excuse.

“When Warren McConnell was fired by The Fredericton Daily Gleaner for poor productivity, he cried discrimination. He suffered from chronic depression. After his third suicide attempt in the 37 years he was employed by the paper, The Gleaner consulted with him and his psychologist and developed a position.”

Howard Levitt the Lang Michener lawyer who wrote the article is in court arguing for the employer. He’s slanting the story to portray employee with the mental disability as the bad guy and the employer as benevolent. The employer here is James K. Irving’s Brunswick News.

Brunswick News Inc. is the largest owner of media in New Brunswick. It is owned by J.K. Irving, who is also co-owner of the “Irving Group of Companies” one of the largest industrial conglomerates in eastern Canada.

While some citizens accuse newspapers owned by Brunswick News of bias and of failing to cover stories that depict subsidiaries in the Irving Group of Companies in a negative light, there is a general misunderstanding who owns the newspaper company. Brunswick News is not owned by the Irving group. It is solely owned by J.K. Irving.

The Irving media concentration of New Brunswick was investigated in the Davey report (1970) and the [[the Davey Committee on combines and the Kent commission (1981)[1] during an era before extensive media concentration took place across Canada in the 1990s; at that time, the Irving concentration in New Brunswick was considered unique in the country’s media landscape.

In 2005, with a donation of $2 million, the Irving family endowed two chairs of journalism in New Brunswick: the Irving Chair in Journalism at St. Thomas University in Fredericton and the Roméo LeBlanc Chair in Journalism sponsored by Brunswick News at Universite de Moncton. An advisory board at each university makes the selections for the chairs. Wikipedia