We Have a Return to Office Problem, and Disabled Workers Are Paying for It

We Have a Return to Office Problem, and Disabled Workers Are Paying for It

I do not usually write posts like this.

I write about accessibility, apps, AI, the stuff I am building. That is my lane. But every once in a while something aggravates me enough that I have to say it out loud, and this is one of those times.

Return to office mandates keep landing. Three days a week. Four days a week. Badge swipes counted. It is happening across tech, across government, across a lot of places that spent five years doing perfectly fine work from people’s houses.

And almost nobody is talking about what it does to disabled workers.

That is the part I want to sit on for a minute, because it is not a small side effect. For a lot of people it is the whole job.

I actually get the argument

Let me be fair here, because I do understand where this comes from.

Downtowns took a hit. The restaurants, the coffee shops, the parking garages, the little sandwich place that lived off the lunch rush. Cities want that back. Politicians want that back. Companies with a lease on twelve floors of an office tower definitely want that back.

I get it. I want vibrant downtowns too. I like cities. I like the culture. That is not the part I am arguing with.

The part I am arguing with is who gets handed the bill.

Five years of proof, thrown out

Here is what bothers me the most.

For about five years, the same employees now being called back worked from home and did the job. Not barely got by. Did the job. Some of them were more productive than they had ever been, because they were not spending two hours a day fighting to get to a desk.

That is five years of evidence. Real evidence, from the actual employees, doing the actual work.

And now we are throwing it out. Not because the work got worse. Because a building is empty and somebody wants it full.

If the work is fine, the work is fine. You do not get to run a five year experiment, get the answer you did not want, and then pretend the experiment never happened.

What “just come in” actually means when you are disabled

This is the part that I do not think most people making these decisions have ever had to think about, so let me spell it out. I am blind. I do not drive. I have done the office commute, and I can tell you what it actually involves.

When you cannot drive, getting to work is not a fifteen minute commute. It is a logistics problem you have to solve again every single morning, and some mornings it does not have a good answer.

I have had to get to an office on a bus route that was not safe. Not inconvenient. Not annoying. Not safe. Crossings with no audible signal, where I am standing at a corner guessing at traffic. Stops on the wrong side of a road nobody should be walking across on foot. Sidewalks torn up for construction with no accessible way around, so the route I learned does not exist anymore and I am figuring it out live. That is real physical risk, and I was taking it so I could sit at a desk and do work I could have done from my house.

Then there is Uber. I have been denied rides. Drivers cancel. You are standing on a curb watching the car get close on the map and then the ride is just gone, and you have no idea if the next one does the same thing. When that happens on a Saturday it is a frustrating hour. When it happens on a workday it is you being late to a meeting for a reason you cannot control and probably do not want to explain to your boss again.

It is also money. A lot of money. When transit does not work for your route, you are paying for rides out of your own pocket, both directions, three or four days a week. Nobody reimburses that. It comes straight out of what you earn, and it is a cost your coworkers who drive to the same building simply do not have.

And that is before you get to the part where some people are managing pain, fatigue, chronic illness, or a body that does not give them the same amount of energy every day. Working from home was not a perk for those folks. It was the thing that made the job possible.

So when a policy says three days in the office, no exceptions, what it really says to a chunk of people is: figure it out or leave.

A lot of them are going to leave. Not because they cannot do the work. Because they cannot do the commute.

The accommodation process is not the safety net people think it is

Somebody is going to say, well, they can just request an accommodation.

Sure. In theory.

In practice that means disclosing your disability to your employer, filling out paperwork, getting a doctor involved, waiting, and then finding out whether your manager decides remote work is “reasonable” for a job you have been doing remotely since 2020. And doing all of that while everybody around you just gets to keep working the way they always did.

That is not a neutral process. That is an extra tax, paid only by the people who already have the least room in their day.

And here is the ugly part. The thing you are asking permission for is the exact thing the company let everybody do for five years without anybody filling out a single form.

What a decent policy actually looks like

I am not saying nobody should ever be in a room together. I am not anti office. In person time is genuinely good for some things.

I am saying be intentional about it instead of counting badge swipes.

Bring people in for the things that actually need a room. Kickoffs, planning, onboarding a new person, the messy conversation that dies over chat. Then let them go home and work.

Judge people on output. Did the work get done, was it good, did the team hit what it said it would hit. That is the measurement. Chairs occupied is not a measurement of anything except chairs.

Make flexibility the default instead of the exception, so nobody has to file paperwork and disclose a medical condition just to keep doing the job they were already doing well.

And if you are a leader reading this and you are about to roll out a mandate, ask one question first: who on my team is this going to quietly push out? Because somebody always is. You just may not hear about it until they are gone.

If you are a policymaker reading this

You are probably hearing from the people who benefit from full offices. Downtown business groups, commercial landlords, the folks with a revitalization plan and a slide deck. Those are organized voices and they show up to meetings.

You are almost certainly not hearing from the disabled employee who quietly gave notice in March because the commute stopped being survivable. That person does not have a lobbyist. That person is busy trying to find another job.

So I am asking you to go looking for that side of it before you sign off on the next mandate, or the next tax incentive tied to office occupancy.

Ask what it does to disabled workers in your city. Ask what your own paratransit system can actually absorb if thousands of people go back to fixed schedules at the same time. Ask whether the accessible transit you are counting on runs early enough, late enough, and often enough for a real work day.

And if you are writing incentives, tie them to something other than warm bodies in a building. Reward companies for hiring and keeping disabled workers. Fund the transit that would make a downtown genuinely reachable. Those things make a city more alive than a mandate ever will.

Right now this issue barely gets discussed at all. That is exactly why it is worth your attention.

Why I care

I care because the accessibility conversation usually stops at software. Screen readers, captions, contrast, alt text. That is most of my work and I will keep doing it.

But policy is accessibility too. You can ship the most accessible product in the world and still build a company that a disabled person cannot actually work at.

Remote work was one of the biggest accessibility wins disabled workers have gotten in my lifetime, and it did not come from a law or a task force. It came by accident, because everybody needed it at once. Now that everybody else does not need it anymore, it is getting taken back.

That is what makes this a crisis and not just an annoying office policy.

One thing you can do

If you made it this far, do one thing with it.

Send this to the person at your company who is writing the policy. Or bring it up the next time a mandate gets announced and everybody nods and moves on. Somebody in that meeting is doing the math on whether they can keep their job, and they are probably not going to say so out loud.

And if you have lived this, hit reply and tell me. I would like to know how common this is, because right now the people it happens to are mostly dealing with it alone.

If your team is working through this and you want help thinking it through, reach out. I do this work.