An employee is fired when he asks for leave to care for his chronically ill father. Another employee is denied leave when her employer asserts that it is not her responsibility to care for her ailing mother as long as her father is still alive. And an employee is called lazy and then fired after taking leave to care for his mother, who is near death.
These are three real-life examples of “caregiver” discrimination from a recent report, “Protecting Family Caregivers from Employment Discrimination,” by the AARP Public Policy Institute and the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Note the care recipients are aging parents, not kids. The report specifically addresses workplace discrimination faced by working caregivers of older adults and calls for an end to stereotyping caregivers as less competent and committed than other workers and instead treating them on par.
For employees facing discrimination, the report serves as a quick guide to what sorts of protections are out there now. And for employers who aren’t ready to handle these cases with compassion, it serves as a warning that advocates for workers who juggle their day jobs with caring for an aging parent are calling for more legal protections. The extreme proposed solution: “family caregivers” as a protected class.
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