The Duty to Accommodate Senior Workers: Its Nature, Scope and Limitations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada’s labour force is increasingly relying on senior workers who are dealing with disabilities and various age-related needs which are not often accommodated. In light of these challenges, the author advocates a strong senior workers’ right to participate in the labour market. The narrow understanding of workplace age discrimination typical of current analyses fails to explain when and why age-based distinctions might be harmful, and tends to emphasize the high cost of accommodating senior workers. The result is to limit the duty to accommodate from the outset. The author examines this issue through the lens of her innovative Dignified Lives Approach to age discrimination, which centres on the argument that every person deserves to be treated with equal concern and respect at any given point in time. The five principles comprising the Dignified Lives Approach help determine when a distinction amounts to discrimination. The principles illustrate that advancing the right of senior workers to age equality includes a broad and extensive duty to accommodate their workplace needs, whether these needs stem from pre-existing disabilities or are age-related. Two key points result: first, the duty to accommodate younger workers with disabilities should apply to senior workers with disabilities; and second, the duty to accommodate senior workers should extend to accommodating their age-related needs apart from any disability. Since the duty to accommodate is already limited by the doctrine of undue hardship, there is no reason to deny accommodation. It may justifiably be limited on a case-by-case basis, but only when strong evidence of undue hardship is presented.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".