Accommodations for long COVID

This episode focuses on the challenges and necessary accommodations for individuals suffering from long COVID in the workplace.

1. Long COVID can be classified as a disability under the ADA, which protects affected employees from discrimination and entitles them to reasonable workplace accommodations.
2. The episode discusses the varying degrees of long COVID symptoms and their impact on individuals' ability to work.
3. It emphasizes the importance of employers and employees working together to find suitable accommodations, highlighting flexibility in work hours and the ability to work remotely as key adjustments.
4. The narrative reveals a significant knowledge gap among some medical professionals regarding long COVID, affecting patients' ability to obtain necessary documentation for workplace adjustments.
5. The personal stories shared illustrate the profound emotional and professional impacts of long COVID on individuals' lives.

1. Introduction to Long COVID and Workplace Challenges

This chapter outlines the episode's focus on the implications of long COVID in the workplace, including legal rights and real-life challenges. Kai Ryssdal: "Today, we explore the significant workplace challenges for employers and employees due to long COVID."

2. Legal Framework and ADA Accommodations

Discusses the legal aspects of long COVID as a disability under the ADA and the types of accommodations that may be requested. Samantha Fields: "Long COVID can be considered a disability under the ADA, which means people who have it are legally protected from discrimination."

3. Personal Stories of Struggle and Adjustment

Shares personal experiences of individuals struggling with long COVID, highlighting their journey to secure reasonable accommodations. Brenda Curry: "I had to sit down with my manager and say, I have long COVID and I've been very sick."

1. Understand Your Rights: If you have long COVID, educate yourself about your rights under the ADA.
2. Communicate with Employers: Openly discuss your health condition and needs with your employer to find practical accommodations.
3. Seek Medical Documentation: Obtain comprehensive medical documentation about your condition to facilitate the accommodations process.
4. Explore Flexible Working Arrangements: If applicable, request flexible working hours or the option to work from home.
5. Utilize Support Networks: Engage with support groups for individuals with long COVID to share experiences and advice.

About 7% of U.S. adults have long COVID, according to a new survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many of those nearly 18 million people say their symptoms affect their ability to work. Disability accommodations could be the answer. Also in this episode, competitors work on catching up to AI chipmaker Nvidia, companies offer 401(k) matching of student loan payments and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau starts regulating buy now, pay later platforms.

People

Brenda Curry, Beth Pollack, Katie Brennan

Companies

None

Books

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Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

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Kai Ryssdal
This is it, everybody. Our May fundraiser ends on Friday, and it's your last chance to help us reach our goal this month. Revenue sources for newsrooms like ours are changing, and donations from you, our marketplace community of listeners, are more important than ever. So please help us reach our May goal before Memorial Day weekend and fund public service journalism for all. Give now@marketplace.org.

Megan McCarty Corino
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Funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks, where they earn a variable interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance. Neither public investing nor any of its affiliates is a bank. Us only. Learn more@public.com disclosure high yield account. A bit of corporate news you can use today and then we'll go flying from american public media.

Kai Ryssdal
This is marketplace in Los Angeles. I'm Kai Rysdal. It is Wednesday today, the 22 May. Good as always to have you along, everybody. I ask as a way to get going today, and with honestly only a little bit of hyperbole, what do you suppose you would get if you went looking for the corporate earnings equivalent of the monthly jobs report, the consumer price index and gross domestic product all rolled into one?

My pick personally would be the first quarter profit report we got from the AI chip company Nvidia after the bell this afternoon. $26 billion in revenue in the first three months of the year $26 billion in revenue in three months last year in Q one, a mere 7 billion Nvidia shares have doubled in less than a year. It's worth more than $2 trillion and is estimated to control more than 90% of the market for high end artificial intelligence computer chips. And with numbers like that, as marketplaces Megan McCarty Corino reports, you can bet there are competitors eyeing a piece of that pie. Nvidia's path to superstardom in the AI economy started with a happy accident.

Chris Miller
The company designs graphics processing units, or GPU's, which were intended to process graphics. For a long time, these chips were mostly used in computer gaming. Chris Miller is author of Chip the Fight for the World's most critical technology. He says GPU's can run multiple calculations at once instead of in a sequence. And it turned out that that same set of calculations were useful in training and deploying AI systems.

So Nvidia leadership leaned into that first mover advantage, says Daniel Newman, a tech analyst with Futurum Group. See, Nvidia doesnt just have a vision of saying lets sell lots of GPU's. Nvidia has a vision of owning an AI factory or a stack. The company has created a whole ecosystem geared to AI, from networking technology to software. Theyve basically shortcut the whole process.

Thats why its tough for competitors to catch up, says Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush securities. Its LeBron James playing 101 against a bunch of kindergartners. Though some rivals are also making impressive plays, AMD and Intel now have processors to rival the performance of Nvidias. Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet are making their own. Googles latest Gemini model was trained entirely on a proprietary AI processor.

Kai Ryssdal
Down the road, this is going to be an AI arms race, a Game of Thrones. But for now, Ive says, those same big tech companies are still shelling out billions to buy up Nvidia chips. I'm Megan McCarty, Corino for Marketplace, continuing. On the corporate beat today. Target reported first quarter earnings today, and they were, and I'm sorry in advance for this.

I just couldn't not. They were off Target. Same store sales. That's a key category, down 3.7% from last year, more than analysts had been guessing. Made all the more troubling by the fact that a consumer spending is still pretty strong and b some of Target's competitors, Walmart among them, are actually doing better than they were this time last year.

Marketplaces Kaylee Wells has that one. There are a couple factors at play here. One, says Columbia University economics professor Brett House, is that retailers are probably seeing. The end of that extra spending that was supported by those pandemic induced savings cushions. Target is one of those retailers relying on middle and working class consumers whose savings accounts ballooned during the pandemic.

Megan McCarty Corino
And those extra saving cushions are largely gone. The other factor now that the pandemic emergency ended, we've been spending our money differently. Perhaps everybody has the yoga pants they need. Shiraz Mian is director of research at Zack's investment research. He says, when we were stuck at home, we stocked up on clothes and electronics and toys, the discretionary items that we wanted rather than needed.

Now, there has been a trend with consumers in the post Covid period going more for services and experiential spending categories, and they're shifting more of their their budget to food and consumables. Arun Sundaram is a senior equity research analyst at CFRA Research. He says when it comes to things we have to buy, Target is losing out to its main competitors, especially Walmart. Food and beverage only accounts for about 20% of Target's annual sales, whereas for Walmart, grocery accounts for 60% of Walmart's us sales. Target expects sales to remain flat or increase slightly this quarter.

Kaylee Wells
Sundaram says the company should do even better next quarter because Target really shines during back to school season. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace Wall street. For the midweek session today. Underwhelming. We'll have the details when we do the numbers.

Kai Ryssdal
If you've paid any attention at all to the Federal Reserve over the past couple of years, you know, chair Powell and the gang are all about the data as they try to figure out where interest rates ought to be. Right now, of course, the big focus is inflation data, personal consumption expenditures, CPI and PPI, too. But the Fed is not the only place that eagerly awaits those data drops every month. Companies do, too, and the run of higher than expected inflation data so far this year is playing a big role when companies decide to borrow money. Marketplaces Justin Ho has more on the corporate bond decision matrix.

Megan McCarty Corino
Figuring out when exactly to issue a bond is a pretty big deal for companies. Drew Pascarella, who teaches finance at Cornell University, says a lot of big companies have entire teams dedicated to it. One of the areas that they're focused on is a calendar of these major news events that potentially would be market moving. That's because after a big piece of economic data comes out, like really hot inflation numbers or a really weak jobs report, traders can panic and start buying or selling government bonds, and that causes yields on all types of bonds to jump around. That's risky.

So rather than gamble, a more conservative company would choose the rate that's available to them before the news comes out. Inflation reports this year have been pretty volatile and hard to predict, but Pascarella says that hasn't always been the case. In times when the economy was boring and predictable, like before the pandemic, the focus on economic data would be less intense because the potential range of outcomes from that data would be less volatile. And the kind of economic data companies focus on changes depending on the economy. Throughout my career, there have been various times when certain pieces of data mattered that's Gila Baugh, chief fixed income strategist at Jenny Montgomery Scott.

He says in the early two thousands, for instance, bond markets focused a lot on manufacturing data. Then, in the early stages of the financial crisis, the monthly jobs reports got a lot of attention, especially after one particularly bad report in September 2007. Laboss's investors had thought things were improving, and as it turned out, that was actually the early stages of a substantial downturn in economic activity. Surprises like that can also cause demand for bonds to fall. A company is not going to come to markets with a new bond deal unless they feel reasonably confident that that bond deal is going to go pretty well.

That's Winnie Caesar, head of strategy at credit sites. She says the stakes are high this year because companies are trying to issue a lot of debt. That's because they know investors want to pile money into bonds since they're offering pretty decent interest rates right now. People are thinking this might be my last chance to buy corporate bonds at 5.5%. Maybe in a year from now they'll only be at four and a half percent.

Caesar says companies will probably issue a lot of bonds this year, and they probably won't need to focus as much on inflation reports. If prices continue to cool off more predictably, then I think that that is reaffirming to the market that we don't have an economy that is reaccelerating or overheating, and that Fed policy of restrictiveness is actually working. As that happens, Cesar says companies might go back to timing their bond sales around jobs reports and other government data the way they did before the pandemic, when inflation wasn't an issue. I'm Justin Ho from Marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal
We do talk a lot about data on this program. As you will know, inflation data like Justin was just talking about the labor market and its data. On and on I could go, but the corollary to all that data is the data ain't gonna get you there. If you wanna know what's actually happening in this economy, the economy is people. One of whom we heard from last winter, he was working as a flight instructor, and he sent us an update.

Adam Kephartz in Poulsbo, Washington I was. Recently hired by Horizon Air, a regional airline based in the Pacific Northwest. I started training for Horizon Air back in April and hope to be flying the jet as soon as July.

Megan McCarty Corino
I actually interviewed back in 2019 before the pandemic hit, so I've been in that pipeline going on four years, five years. So it's been a long process, end of last year, November or December. I had. I could see that I was getting really close, and so I had reached out to another airline just to make sure to cover my bases and see if I could get an interview. And they processed my paperwork very quickly.

They said, yep, we want to interview you. And then I heard nothing for four and a half months. But then, thankfully, the other, the airline that I work for now was able to say, hey, we have the class date for you, and we'd love to get you on board as soon as possible.

Getting my foot in that door at this airline has meant a lot to both me and my wife because it's based in the Pacific Northwest. The bases are going to be, you know, cities that aren't that hard to reach from where I live right now, you know, being a junior pilot, I could be based wherever the company needs me. And so at least initially, for the first couple months, I anticipate perfect, probably having to come up with some sort of a crash pad or Airbnb or something where I am paying a little bit out of pocket. But long term, it certainly looks like I'd be very likely to be based in Seattle within maybe six months.

Through the support of my wife financially, we were able to make things work in the last five years while I was undertaking all this flight training. But now, as we, you know, start to have kind of a more normalized, I guess, for lack of a better term, dual income, that'll allow us to start checking some boxes off the projects list that we've been accumulating, doing some things in our yard, around the house that, you know, weren't musts at the time, but certainly were wants financially. You know, I'm at a point now where it's really important to both me and my wife to get a financial advisor. We've been able to kind of figure things out on our own prior to this, but now I'm starting to think, okay, this is the career. I want to make sure to make wise decisions financially and really set ourselves up for success all the way through retirement.

Kai Ryssdal
Adam KebhArdt coming this summer to skies near you. We cannot do this series without you, no matter where you are, no matter what you do. Tell us about your economy, would you? Marketplace.org dot myeconomy coming up. Being out in the community and helping people, it's really powerful.

You gotta get out there, people. First, though, let's do the numbers. Dalv Industrial is off 201 points today. That is a half percent. 39,671.

The Nasdaq off 31 points. Two tenths percent, 16,801. The S and P 500 dipped 14 points, about three tenths percent, 53 and seven there. Megan McCarty Corino was telling us about chip maker Nvidia and all the competitors who are scrambling to keep up. Nvidia down about a half percent the day before that earnings announcement came out 5% after the bell.

Last time I checked to the upside, intel shed 1%. Advanced micro devices, better known as AMD, gained about a half percent. Qualcomm lifted 1% today. Bond prices down. Yield on the ten year teno rose to 4.42%.

You're listening to marketplace.

This is it, everybody. Our may fundraiser ends on Friday, and it's your last chance to help us reach our goal this month. Revenue sources for newsrooms like ours are changing, and donations from you, our marketplace community of listeners, are more important than ever. So please help us reach our may goal before Memorial Day weekend and fund public service journalism for all. Give now@marketplace.org.

donate and thanks.

E
My name is Lee Hawkins. I've been a journalist for over 25 years. On my new podcast, what happened in Alabama? I get answers to some of the hardest questions about how things came to be for many black americans, and the truth that must come before any reconciliation can happen. I investigate my family history, my upbringing in Minnesota, and my father's painful nightmares about growing up in Alabama.

What happened in Alabama is a new series, confronting the cycles of trauma for myself, my family and for many black americans. Listen now.

Kai Ryssdal
This is marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. BNPL is the marketplace initialism of the day. Today buy now, pay later companies offering that particular financial service have long marketed themselves as different than traditional credit cards, a more accessible and sometimes interest free alternative. Soon, though, BNPL is going to be regulated in some of the same ways as traditional plastic.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced new rules today that will oblige pay later companies, Afterpay and Klarna are two you might have heard of, it will oblige them to investigate when consumers dispute a charge and also to issue refunds for returned products, along with periodic billing statements. Marketplaces of animar has more now on what that means for the booming BNPL industry and it's customers. Many of buy now, pay later's repeat customers are financially vulnerable to begin with, says Nadine Chabrier with the center for Responsible lending. Users tend to be younger. They tend to be black latino consumers of color, she says.

Megan McCarty Corino
Many have lower annual incomes and a high risk of becoming overextended. And the CFPB's rules are the first real attempt to protect those borrowers, says Cliff Robbie, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin. It's adding a little bit more structure to what's been a pretty loosely regulated space where consumers sometimes get stuck paying off loans even after receiving a faulty product or returning one to the retailer. But the new standards won't make waves in most of the buy now, pay later industry. Not at all.

The big players already have these practices in place, for the most part. Instead, analyst Claire Tasson with Morning Consult says they send companies like Affirm and Afterpay a message that the CFPB is going to treat them the same as credit card providers going forward, probably including tighter regulations down the road, like requiring these platforms to vet borrowers more thoroughly to make sure they can pay back their loans. I actually think that benefits BNPL lenders. Chi Chi Wu is with the National Consumer Law center. She says strong buyer protections are part of what makes credit cards so appealing.

And they could help buy now, pay later, reach new customers. You know, older consumers such as myself, a gen xer, might feel more comfortable using them and maybe even replace borrowers shut out by stricter rules. I'm Savannah Marr for marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal
The White House announced another tranche of student loan forgiveness this morning. That brings the total, the Department of Education says, to nearly 5 million borrowers not having to pay back $167 billion in outstanding loans. That kind of debt has ripple effects throughout the economy, as the borrowers obviously know things they can't spend money on so that they can pay their loans. But increasingly, companies have come to realize it, too. And in fact, some employers have been rolling out programs that let workers reduce their student debt burden today while saving for retirement tomorrow.

Marketplaces Daniel Ackerman explains that one back. In 2018, the medical device maker Abbott found many of its younger employees were facing a financial quandary. Sometimes they have to make a choice, pay school debt or save for retirement. That's Diego Martinez, Abbott's vp of benefits. He says student debt was preventing workers from paying into their 401K plans, which meant they were giving up on the company's matching contribution.

Megan McCarty Corino
Abbott decided to make the contributions anyway, provided the employees were paying their loans. The program that we created was the first of its kind, so we really had to pave our way back then. That meant getting a special letter of permission from the IR's. But a new law taking effect this year allows any employer to offer retirement matching of student loan payments. There's certainly a lot of Americans with a lot of student loan debt.

Who might be excited about this? Olivia Mitchell at the Wharton School co authored new research on how this policy could play out for workers in the long run. The short answer? Pretty well. This policy would allow workers to consume more, actually to spend more out of their earnings, by about 3% more prior to retirement.

The new benefit comes with some costs for companies, like figuring out new tax rules and making sure participants are actually making their loan payments. Still, a growing number of companies are starting to offer the match. We'd been looking at student loan debt for a long time now. Marco Diaz is global head of benefits for News Corp. The firm rolled out loan matching this year, and Diaz says it wasn't just fresh from college, new employees who took advantage.

We're also getting parents of children who have taken on student loan as a parent, maybe for the second time in their lives. Diaz says the program has convinced candidates to accept news corpse offers over competitors. I'm Daniel Ackerman for marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal
Two seemingly contradictory things can be at the same time true thing one, pandemic is over thing two. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 7% of all the adults in this economy, that is 17 million people, said in March of this year that they've got long Covid. There are huge lifestyle challenges that go with that, of course. And there are huge workplace challenges, too, for employer and employee as marketplaces Samantha. Fields reports, before Brenda Curry got Covid, work was a huge part of her identity.

Megan McCarty Corino
She had two jobs, one as a hotel concierge in Portland, Oregon, and another as a kids ski coach. And that was my life and my livelihood. But in March of 2020, as the world was shutting down, she got sick, and she never fully recovered. Months later, I was having severe issues with my eyes and my cognition. You know, there was a disconnect between my brain and my eyes, and there still is.

She would get dizzy when she stood up. She had intense fatigue. She couldn't read or watch movies, and she realized she couldn't work, at least not like she had before. I was having a hard time, and like I said, my career was so important to me, I was at a complete loss. Perry's experience sounds familiar to Beth Pollack.

She's a research scientist at MIT who's studying long Covid. What you hear often is a story of loss. And one of the losses that really impacts people, both personally in their lives and professionally and financially, is that too often they've had to lose their careers. For some people, she says, long Covid is so severe that they really can't work. But for many others, what they really need is the right accommodations so that they are able to continue to work.

Long Covid can be considered a disability under the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities act, which means people who have it are legally protected from discrimination and have a right to request reasonable accommodations at work. Katie Brennan at the Society for Human Resource Management says that might mean taking extra leave or things like telework flex scheduling, extra rest breaks. It really is dependent on the particular disability and employees limitations. Employers are required to make reasonable accommodations for people with qualifying medical conditions, as long as it doesn't pose an undue burden on them. In most cases, an employer is going to approve an accommodation if a disability or illness isn't visibly obvious, which is often the case with long Covid.

Employers can request documentation from a doctor, but many doctors don't know much about long Covid or take it seriously, and those that do are in high demand, like Doctor Monica Verdusco Gutierrez. She directs the long Covid clinic at UT Health San Antonio. Some patients, I will see them. Maybe it's a year after they've been dealing with COVID and then the waiting list to get into clinic can be several months. Many who find their way to her have struggled to find the right care or support.

I think there's challenges because still there's not a lot of clarity in the diagnosis. There's no test or biomarker yet that shows long Covid and Rodusco Gutierrez says. Partly because of that, some clinicians may not be even comfortable writing for accommodations, which can stand in the way of people getting the support they need at work. Beth Pollack at MIT recently co authored a piece for the Harvard Business Review called Long Covid at a manager's guide. And she says, in researching it, we heard many stories from people losing their careers to people being able to not only keep working but also be promoted and really thrive in their careers.

The difference, she says, was whether they were able to get the accommodations they needed. For Brenda Curry in Portland, it took a while to find a job she could do. The first couple of jobs she tried in customer service ended up being too much. She quit without ever telling anyone. She has long Covid because it's invisible, and I felt like it would work against me.

Eventually, when she was ready to try working again, she applied for a part time job at a new retail store opening in town. And it was very clear from the beginning that I was really struggling, and I had to sit down with my manager and say, I have long Covid and I've been very sick. Her manager has worked around her limitations, scheduling her for shorter shifts and telling her that anytime she needs to take a break, she can. Being back at work and being part of the economy and also being out in the community and helping people, it's really powerful. It still takes all of her energy to work just 15 hours a week, but Curry says she's grateful to be able to do it.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

Kai Ryssdal
This final note on the way out today, a little bit of politics of this economy and some economic trivia all in one. The White House said today it's going to release a million barrels of gasoline from the Northeast gasoline supply reserve. In other news, we've got a Northeast gasoline supply reserve. Congress apparently set it up in 2014 after superstorm Sandy hit New York. Congress also said it's got to be shut down by the end of this fiscal year, and this release will just about take care of that.

The politics of this economy go like this. The Biden administration obviously now gets to say it's doing what it can to control pump prices. The economic trivia is that that million barrels comes to 42 million gallons oil and gas barrels, or only 42 gallons apiece. Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Jess Drew Jostadt, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton Thorpe, Juan Carlos Torado and Becca Weinman. Jeff Peters is the manager of media production.

And I'm Kai Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is apm.

Megan McCarty Corino
Hey, everyone, it's Reema Grace, host of this is uncomfortable. If you're looking for some good recommendations on books to read, well, you should join. This is uncomfortable's summer book club every other week in our newsletter, well share a new book thatll make you rethink your relationship to money, class and work, while also featuring an interview with the author or an expert on the topic. Plus, when you join, youll be entered in a giveaway where you could win some this is uncomfortable merch. Be sure to check it out.

Sign up today@marketplace.org. bookclub.