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EU's Top Court May Define Obesity As a Disability
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes The EU's top court is considering a test case which could oblige employers to treat obesity as a disability. Denmark has asked the European Court of Justice to rule on the case of a male childminder who says he was sacked for being too fat. The court's final ruling will be binding across the EU. It is seen as especially significant because of rising obesity levels in Europe and elsewhere, including the US. If the judges decide it is a disability then employers could face new obligations. Employers might in future have a duty to create reserved car parking spaces for obese staff, or adjust the office furniture for them, she said.
The number of medical problems that actually cause obesity is very, very small.
The primary cause in 99.99% of cases is a higher intake of calories than output of calories as activity.
MD anonymous coward here, and sorry, that is how it is.
If this goes through, they should mandate a strict diet of vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, seeds, whole grains, fish and water for the duration of their benefits collection period. If this could somehow be enforced, very few of them would be on "disability" for long. By the same token, getting drunk should be considered for disability. The solution is simple. Stop eating processed garbage and eat lots of whole foods instead.
One can hope that if this goes through they put the designated parking spots at the back of the parking lot.
Actually, in the olden days, they'd likely be the ones doing the rounding, locking and burning.
Historically, obesity was only a problem for the very well off.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
If obesity is a disability, and the legal definition of maiming is to disable or disfigure, will McDonald's advertising -- particularly when it materially misleads about health issues, like their Olympics sponsorship campaigns -- be ruled negligent maiming?
Not saying it should or shouldn't -- just raising the question.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I expect that the population that's truly morbidly obese to the point that they need protection due to a medical condition that cannot be controlled is very, very small.
I don't think that in most cases being obese should be a protected category in the sense that an employer should be forced to purchase special furniture or to assign special parking. I say this as someone that isn't exactly tiny myself, but attempts to keep it under control. I'd argue that many such "protections" would actually be worse for the obese individual, rather than better. We've already seen lots of obese people abusing power-chairs and power-shopping-carts; we need people to put in more effort, not less.
If there are underlying medical reasons that should dictate special treatment, then it's those reasons that should give an obese person their special treatment, not the fact that they are obese.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Obesity is a mental disability, most often an addiction to a wrong diet containing many addictive ingredients.
The way most people feed themselves is by stuffing enormous amounts of carbs, often a lot of them sugars in their face. Combine those with a little fat and all your body does is store fat and try and balance the glucose content of your blood. The carbs make your gut bacteria generate "happy hormones" that get in your blood, making you hungry and cranky if you don't get your fix, whether your body actually needs food or not.
The symptoms of this addiction are obesity and diabetes type 2. Please treat it as an addiction, not as a phyisical disability. If you do that, for example being taller than 6ft5 should be treated as a disability too and be given all benefits that should come with such a status. If being a size that's outside of what society will cater for is a reason to call people disabled.
Tall people can't help being tall, fat people in over 95% of the cases can help it if they kick the habit. If you treat obesity as a physical disability, you are insulting everyone with a physical disability for which there is no cure.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
the vast majority of plants *do not eat*, yet they gain non-water mass. Humans aren't a closed system.
The stupidity enclosed in the post above has increased my intracranial pressure to the point of spontaneous detonation.
>America went in to stop some serious badness happening
Oh yes, those imaginary WMDs would do some real damage. Thank God the US was there to save the day.
Why would any employer refuse to hire obese workers as long as they can pull their own weight, so to speak ?
If obesity is treated as an disability, then stupidity would be not that far off
And when stupidity is treated as an disability, then employers are forced to hire people no matter how fucking stupid they are !
Just how far are we going to allow this political correctness madness to spread ?
Why would any employer refuse to hire obese workers as long as they can pull their own weight, so to speak ?
Assuming that was a serious question, the first thing that comes to mind is that clinical obesity appears to significantly increase the risk of quite a few serious medical conditions. In much (all?) of Europe, employers are directly on the hook financially when employees take time off sick. Moreover, there are indirect consequences, such as unfairly increasing the workload on other staff when someone is off work, possibly putting up the price for the employer and/or all of their staff if the employer offers benefits like subsidised private health insurance, and even little resentment-breeding things like reserving scarce parking spaces for specific staff necessarily at a loss to everyone else.
To me, the moral position here seems very simple. If someone is obese for a genuine medical reason they can't avoid then everyone should try to accommodate them in reasonable ways. If someone is obese for any other reason, perhaps they should try going to the park or the gym instead of going to court. Employers should no more be forced to accommodate a voluntarily obese person's laziness than they should be forced to grant smokers longer breaks than everyone else and provide dedicated facilities for the smokers to poison themselves in.
Whether it is worth hiring an obese person anyway because they are good at doing a certain job is a separate question, of course. I'm just trying to show some reasonably objective arguments for why an employer might wish to discriminate on the basis of obesity.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't think it is a matter of "more rights", any more than you get "more rights" when you turn 40 and enter that legally protected class in the US.
The big difference being that you can't stop yourself from aging, you can stop yourself from becoming obese. Short of rare (much more rare than obese folks want you to think) medical conditions, nobody has an excuse to be obese, you're not born that way and you're not naturally inclined to become that way without excessively unhealthy habits.
How people look doesn't really matter to most technical workers, but would you rather hire the ideal-weight handsome person, or the 450 pound ugly guy?
Without a doubt, the ideal-weight handsome guy, because the 450lb obese guy demonstrates simply by being obese he lacks basic self control, and likely doesn't have the discipline I desire from employees. If you look like you can't be bothered to give a damn about your own personal health, why would I expect you to give a damn about your arguably less important job? Not to mention as an employer I don't want the added risk of somebody overworking themselves and having a heart attack on the job, something which seems less likely in an individual who appears healthy.
Yes, employers discriminate, because otherwise they'd be forced to hire every yahoo that strolls in and their business would suffer for it. Some qualities shouldn't be subject to discrimination; ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and plenty more. But obesity? To be obese is, generally speaking, a choice. Most people don't want to accept that, but it's the truth, every day you choose not to start exercising and eating healthy is a day you choose to remain obese. A lot of people argue they don't have time to exercise or the money to eat healthy, but it doesn't take much searching to find helpful advice from folks who thought the same thing until they realized they were completely wrong.
If an employer tells you he's not going to hire you because they maintain a professional workplace and your hair is blue and spikey, you can either choose to do something about your hair or you can throw a fit and act like it's not reasonable to want your employees to give the impression they're employed when people walk in the door and either one is your right. The same with obesity, if somebody tells you your ass won't fit in their chairs so they can't hire you, you can either throw a fit and act like they should invest in all new office furniture to cater to you, or you can go get a bike and invest in your own health, come back and get the job looking (and feeling) like a new person.
you're not born that way
Ever seen a newborn? Yes, you *are* born that way. ;)
But I agree with your other points. Although, I must nuance your views a bit. For a health freak who doesn't eat the same stuff as the rest of us and considers that "normal", or someone blessed with a fast metabolism who can hog out on junk food and stay slim, it may be hard to comprehend that for some people it is in fact quite hard to lose weight and keep it off.
The situation is a bit more complex than just saying "put down that fork". For a lot of us overweight and obese people, the basic feedback loop that tells us when we've had enough is broken. And most of the fault there lies with the previous generation, although it's hard to blame them when they didn't know better. They were for the most part hard working labourers raised on big meals, dumping those same big meals onto the plates of their offspring, while simultaneously doing everything in their power and giving us all the opportunities to ensure we would never have to work as hard as they do. Oh, and of course, coming from a situation of scarcity, they would not accept "I've had enough" while there was still food on the plate... So from a young age we're raised on the wrong idea of how big a meal should be and taught to ignore the signals our bodies tell us when we've had enough. Now we're no longer capable of recognising those signals, assuming our bodies still bother sending them at all. We're the ones who have to measure and track to compensate for that broken feedback loop. Even now, after years of being conscious about my food intake, the meals I eat still look rather small to me. Yet they do manage to fill my belly and satisfy me just fine, and I *know* I feel better eating smaller meals rather than those feasts that leave you bloated for hours to come. But I can still not rely on those automatic clues to know when I've had enough like some others do; I'll always have to be conscious about what I eat and how much.
Now, combine previous with the realities of modern life: most of us have a sedentary life, spending the bulk of our days in an office chair. Most food these days is so rich in calories, fat, other junk, and processed to death... Food that's much too rich, combined with way too little time for physical exercise. Again something that may be alien to some; as I understand, commute times in the States are rather short. But here in Europe it's not unheard of to be away for 11 hours a day for work alone. My commute eats a good 2.5 hours out of my day, *on a good day*.
So while I agree with what you say: being overweight is a matter of choice, it's not as simple as most people blessed with better metabolisms pretend it is. We can't simply close our eyes, click our heels together three times and wish ourselves thin. For some of us, it is rather hard. I for one am in that camp: it takes a lot of effort to lose weight, and constant (luckily mild in my case) vigilance to keep it off. To give you an idea, in order to lose 10kg (22lb) over a period of 3 months, one 125g (4.4oz) bag of rice and one chicken breast would be my total food intake over 4 days, for that entire 3 month period. We're measuring daily food intake in tablespoons at that time, and the number is either single digits or "let's count in hex so we can keep it in single digits". Yeah, I work out too. No, it doesn't help. Weight loss happens in the kitchen, not the gym, no matter what people tell you.
It's understandable that some people just consider it too much work for something they don't perceive as a benefit: if you're a good coder, it doesn't matter how fit you are. The increased health and fitness may perhaps improve your brain functions a bit, but at the expense of coding time which builds and maintains your skills. If you're a good coder now , while overweight, it must mean your current strategy is working. Do you really want to risk messing with that? Especially considering that computer time is fun time, while physical
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?