Employers Are Required by Law to Reasonably Accommodate Illiteracy
At the end of last year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published a study entitled, To Read or Not to Read. The study was based on a variety of data sources and ultimately concluded that, because of poor reading and writing skills, people entering the American workforce are not prepared for the demands that they will face in the work place.
The study reported that employers ranked reading and writing as the top deficiency in newly hired employees. According to the study, 38% of the employers surveyed found high school graduates “deficient” in reading comprehension, and 63% of those employers rated this basic skill as “very important”. “Written communications” tops the list of applied skills found lacking in high school and college graduates alike and, surprisingly, a staggering one in five U.S. workers reads at a lower skill level than their job requires.
This low skill level has become a national issue that has prompted federal legislation entitled The Striving Readers Act of 2007 which, if passed, will establish an adolescent literacy program by providing a greater investment in basic reading and writing skills training for students in fourth through twelfth grade.
For many years, California employers have been guided by a little known Labor Code section called the Employee Literacy Assistance Act. This Act applies to every private California employer with 25 or more employees. It requires these employers to reasonably accommodate and assist any employee who reveals a problem with illiteracy and who requests employer assistance to enroll in an adult literacy education program, provided that this accommodation does not create an undue hardship for the employer. “Employer assistance” in this respect includes, but is not limited to, providing the employee with the locations of literacy education programs or arranging for a literacy education provider to visit the employee’s workplace. The employer is not, however, required to provide time off with pay for an employee to enroll in or attend such a program.
The Labor Code further provides that an employee who discloses a problem with illiteracy and who satisfactorily performs the job in spite of that problem may not be discharged because of his or her disclosure. As with all personal employee information, the employer must make reasonable efforts to safeguard the fact that the employee has revealed an illiteracy problem.