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Autism and the Right to a Hypersensitivity-Friendly Workspace

Autism and the Right to a Hypersensitivity-Friendly Workspace PUBLIC HEALTH ETHICS VOLUME 14 ISSUE 3 2021 281–287 281 • • • Autism and the Right to a Hypersensitivity- Friendly Workspace Bouke de Vries *, Umea˚ University and KU Leuven *Postdoctoral Research fellow, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Humanishuset, Umea˚ University, 907 36 Umea˚, Sweden. Email: bouke.devries@umu.se. Many individuals on the autism spectrum are hypersensitive to certain sensory stimuli. For this group, as well as for non-autistic individuals with sensory processing disorders, being exposed to e.g. fluorescent lights, perfume odours, and various sounds and noises can be real torment. In this article, I consider the normative implications of such offence for the design of office spaces, which is a topic that has not received any attention from philosophers. After identifying different ways in which the senses of hypersensitive workers might be protected within these spaces, I show that many of such accommodations can be made at reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be a legal requirement. explosion in my ear. Minor noises that most people The Challenges of Being can tune out drove me to distraction. When I was in college, my roommate’s hair dryer sounded like Hypersensitive ajet plane taking off (Grandin, 2009: 63). Virtually all of us encounter things from time to time As well as sound, hypersensitive reactions are often that we find noisy, smelly or visually off-putting. For triggered by visual stimuli. Consider the following testi- most of us, such experiences do not have a major impact mony by Lori Sealy, a musician from Mississippi: on our lives. As scholars such as Joel Feinberg would put it, they offend us without compromising our well-being My visual experience is [.. .] rather radical. Bright light can be painful — honestly, any light can be and ability to function to such a degree as to cause us painful and I often compensate with sunglasses. I harm (Feinberg, 1988). can also get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of Things are different for those who are hypersensitive imagery that my mind is attempting to process at to sensory input, i.e. for those who have an overdevel- one time. I take in everything in a panoramic oped capacity for hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling and/ sense — and that sometimes makes it hard for or tasting. Many individuals with autism spectrum con- me to focus on the central thing I’m supposed ditions (ASC) or, as some prefer to refer to themselves, to see (Sealy, 2016). 1 2 ‘autists’, fall into this category. However, not every Still another common form of hypersensitivity person with hypersensitivity is also autistic according involves overreaction to smells. For example, Donna to several recent studies, which have found that children Williams, an Australian writer, recollects how the per- with a sensory processing disorder (SPD) ‘show atypical fume of one specific woman: sensory behaviours to the same or greater degree as ASC children’ but without displaying the latter’s primary lan- Made the inside of my nose feel like it had been walled up with clay up to my eyebrows. Her per- guage and social deficits (Owen et al., 2013; Chang et al., fume burned my lungs; my mouth tasted like I 2014; Reis et al., 2017; Tavassoli et al., 2018). had eaten a bunch of sickly smelling flowers Being hypersensitive can, and frequently does, affect (Williams, 1998: 57). individuals in highly negative ways. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Exactly how hypersensitive individuals react to these recounts: and other sensory stimuli (e.g. ones involving touch and taste) varies. Apart from the fact that there are inter- When I was little, loud noises were [...]aproblem, personal differences (Simpson, 2016), the same hyper- often feeling like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. sensitive individual might respond differently to a given They actually caused pain. I was scared to death of balloons popping, because the sound was like an sensory stimulus depending on the context (Bogdashina doi:10.1093/phe/phab021 Advance Access publication on 1 August 2021 V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 282 DE VRIES and Casanova, 2016: 96–99). Still, reactions like the ones employers should only be required to accommodate just mentioned are common among this group, and hypersensitive office-workers if it is possible for them might in extreme cases result in a partial or full shut- to do so. To show that it is, consider first some of the down of sensory channels, leaving the overstimulated ways in which they might protect hyper-auditory person partially or wholly incapacitated (Bogdashina employees from sensory overload. One way in which and Casanova, 2016: 70). they may do this is by installing carpet flooring or soft Whereas being hypersensitive can, and usually does, flooring, which are less noisy than laminated flooring hamper people’s welfare and ability to function within so- (National Autistic Society, 2018). Another way is for ciety, then, the question of what moral duties, if any, states them to allocate offices to hyper-auditory workers that have to help protect those with overdeveloped senses has are not in the vicinity of photocopiers, shredders, print- not been investigated by scholars. In this article, I help to fill ers; and heating, ventilation and air conditioning sys- this lacuna by considering the normative implications of tems (Gaines et al., 2016: 163). Furthermore, when hypersensitivity for the design of office spaces. Doing so is choosing locations for future office buildings, they could important, as research has shown that a large proportion of seek to avoid locations near railways, busy commercial autistic employees struggle with sensory overload at work sites, and roadways with high volumes of traffic insofar (e.g. Beardon and Edmonds, 2007; Baldwin et al., 2014; as this does not interfere with key organizational objec- Lorenz et al., 2016; Hayward et al., 2018). For example, a tives, such as being easily reachable by clients (Pedder & report by Beardon and Edmonds (2007) found that, among Scampton Architects, 2017). 237 UK-nationals with Asperger Syndrome (AS) who had In order to accommodate employees with olfactory filled out a questionnaire about living with AS, over a third hyper sensibilities, some authors have recommended reported this problem. To gain a sense of the kinds of sen- that employers use a background fragrance that drives sory issues that these individuals faced, consider some of out the smells of perfumes and deodorants (Clements their comments: and Zarkowska, 2000: 80). An alternative measure would be for them to forbid their workers from wearing i. ‘Hate noise, but endured 10 years in an open plan staffroom, to my acute daily discomfort.’ (strong-smelling) perfume and deodorant. However, ii. ‘I cannot cope with excessive/odd noise—both from since this measure is considerably more intrusive, colleagues warbling (sorry, I don’t mean to be rude) or some might favour the previous measure, possibly com- from high-pitched electronic and similar machinery.’ bined with a policy that encourages employees to eschew iii. ‘Any kind of noise can be annoying some days. All wearing (strong-smelling) perfume and deodorant with- loud noise is painful always.’ out forcing them to do so. iv. ‘Fluorescent lights make me ill.’ Still another set of office-space accommodations v. ‘Sensitive to noise, light, smells etc etc. I need to addresses the sensory needs of hyper-visual employees. work in a quiet environment, preferably on my One way in which this may be done is by painting the own with as little artificial lighting as possible and office walls in low-arousal colours, such as cream and no strong odours.’ pastel shades (Gaines et al., 2016: 61). Another way involves installing non-fluorescent lights within these The remainder of this article is structured as follows. I spaces, as some hypersensitive individuals have such ac- begin by showing that there are various ways in which curate sight that they can perceive a 60-cycle flicker, employers might accommodate the sensory needs of which might cause them to suffer headaches or worse hypersensitive workers within office spaces. Next, I sug- (Grandin, 2009: 70). gest that many of these accommodations can be made at At this point, it ought to be noted that, even in the reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be best-located and best-designed offices, sensory overload legally required. is not always avoidable. As such, it can be highly useful for organizations to have a room in which those with Office-Space Accommodations for overstimulated senses can retreat in order to calm down. Such rooms ought to be low in stimuli, and are ideally Hypersensitive Employees: Some used exclusively for this purpose (Simpson, 2016). Examples Alternatively, or in addition, a garden might be used as a place of retreat, as might a tent or a part of a room that Congruent with the well-known dictum, ‘ought implies can’ (see e.g. Vranas, 2018), I assume in this article that is segregated with book cases (Gaines et al., 2016: 60). THE RIGHT TO A HYPERSENSITIVITY-FRIENDLY WORKSPACE 283 monotonous jobs that require high levels of accuracy The Case for Accommodating such as coding and laboratory work (Hagner and Hypersensitive Employees Cooney, 2005; Solomon, 2020). What about cases where (certain ways of) accommo- Having looked at several examples of office-space dating the sensory needs of hypersensitive office- accommodations for hypersensitive employees, it bears workers do impose significant costs on employers on mentioning that, just because this group would benefit both the short-term and long-term? Some might say from such accommodations does not entail that their that it would be problematic for this group to incur employers should be legally required to make them. In such costs, or simply to do so above a certain threshold. order to determine whether this is the case, one must also Apart from the fact that it might hinder competition by consider the costs of such requirements, which some creating additional barriers for people to start small busi- critics might argue would be excessive. nesses, they may argue that everyone in society has a duty While there are clearly limits to how much employers of justice to help ensure that fellow citizens and residents or, for that matter, states (see below), can be expected to have fair opportunities for societal participation (cf. invest in protecting office-workers from sensory over- Anderson, 1999; Rawls, 1999; Mason, 2006), including load, I believe that the current objection is too strong. fair opportunities for participation in the labour market The easiest way of showing this is to point out the prob- (Brown, 2021), and that, because of this, the costs of lems with its minor premise. Upon reflection, it turns accommodating hypersensitive office-workers should out that there are various things that employers can do in be partially, if not fully, covered by public subsidies. order to protect their workers from sensory overload at I will not try to settle here how, if at all, the costs of no significant expense. For example, allocating the quiet- reasonable accommodations for hypersensitive workers est offices in the building to hypersensitive workers need ought to be divided between employers and the state, not cost anything. Likewise, having the office walls which is an issue that is well beyond this article’s scope painted in cream or pastel shades is not necessarily (for a discussion of it, see e.g. Moss and Malin, 1998). more expensive than having them painted in bright col- The point that I want to make is more modest, namely ours, just as using LED lighting is not necessarily more that even when the costs of (some) office-space accom- expensive than using fluorescent lighting. modations for hypersensitive workers are unlikely to be But even when certain ways of accommodating the completely off-set over time, there are good grounds for sensory needs of hypersensitive office-workers impose thinking that the accommodations should be made costs on the short-term—think, for instance, of a case nonetheless when the costs of doing so are not too great where an employer replaces the laminate flooring of an (whether this is the case will depend on many factors that office building with carpet flooring even though it could I cannot begin to discuss in this article, including on have been used a few years longer—these accommoda- whether the costs in question are absorbed by the em- tions will sometimes repay themselves over time. One rea- ployer, the state, or both, and, in case of the employer, on son for this is that offices that are low in stimuli have how large the organization is). To see this, notice that, been found to have a tendency to increase general prod- although there are other valuable goods on which this uctivity (see the studies cited in Al Horr et al., 2016: 383 money could be spent—e.g. employers might invest it in and Kamarulzaman et al., 2011: 265), which may not just offering better services or in making better products, be because they make hypersensitive workers more pro- whereas states might use it to alleviate child poverty or ductive, but also because they might enhance the output reduce carbon emissions, or simply leave the money for of other workers, including that of individuals who are tax-payers to spend as they see fit—accommodating the highly sensitive and who are thought to make up approxi- sensory needs of hypersensitive workers is of great moral mately 15–20 per cent of the population (Boterberg and importance. One reason for this was mentioned when I Warreyn, 2016). Another reason is that hypersensitivity- noted that, for many hypersensitive individuals, working friendly organizations are more likely to attract, as well as in a hypersensitivity-unfriendly environment takes a to retain, high-functioning autistic workers. Since these heavy toll of their health and welfare. In addition to workers generally have greater-than-average abilities to being problematic in itself, especially given the large detect patterns, remember large amounts of information amounts of time that people spent on the job (for ex- and concentrate on repetitive tasks (Scott et al., 2017; ample, some estimates suggest that Americans spend 25 Solomon, 2020), which come on top of relatively high per cent of their lives at work; Warr and Clapperton, levels of trustworthiness and integrity (Scott et al., 2017), 2009), these harms may render it difficult for them to many of them are especially qualified to perform stay in employment and thereby threaten their access to 284 DE VRIES various work-related goods. One might think here not to one that requires employers to make certain accom- modations for hypersensitive workers regardless of only of remuneration and employment-based health in- surance, but also of a professional identity that can whether they currently have such workers or know to have such workers, about which more shortly. imbue their life with meaning and structure (Gheaus One is that some individuals never tell their employer and Herzog, 2016) and of regular social interaction, about their autism, which may leave the latter ignorant which, apart from being valuable in its own right, has of any autism-related special needs that they might have. been shown to be a petri dish for the development of Reviewing the literature on workplace accommodations friendships (e.g. Sias and Cahill, 1998). for people on the spectrum, Lindsay et al. (2021) found that, among four studies that included rates of workplace Policy Implications disclosure, between 25 per cent and 69 per cent of autistic employees had not disclosed their autism to their em- My aim in this final section is to consider in some detail ployer, which, in spite of the small sample sizes, points to the policy implications of my arguments thus far. The a real problem. In most cases, this reluctance was moti- most important implication is that in countries where vated by fears of being stigmatized and of suffering dis- there are currently no legal requirements to accommo- crimination (e.g. Morris et al., 2015), which causes some date hypersensitive workers, legislation ought to be autists to try to hide their condition by mimicking the introduced that mandates such accommodations when behaviours of their neurotypical peers (Lindsay et al., they can be made at reasonable cost. As far as I am aware, 2019). no such legislation currently exists. There are, to be sure, The other problem with the current approach is to do countries where employers have legal obligations to ac- with the fact that decisions about the locations of office commodate autistic employees, who it was noted in the buildings, as well as ones about their floor covering, first section often suffer from one or more forms of lighting, and so on, have a big impact on how hypersensitivity. In the US, the Rehabilitation Act of hypersensitivity-friendly a workplace is, but are difficult 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and/or costly to overturn once implemented. Because of require governmental organizations on both the federal this, it is highly important that certain accommodations level and state level to provide reasonable accommoda- be made even before hypersensitive individuals have tions to people with disabilities, including to autistic joined the workforce or are known to have done so, people (Hensel, 2017), insofar as this renders these indi- which is something that legislation can help to achieve. viduals qualified to do specific jobs. In Europe, both the For although the precise accommodations that hyper- EU and several of its individual member states have rati- sensitive workers need will vary from one hypersensitive fied the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with worker to the next, we have seen in the first section that Disabilities of 2008, which gives people with autism and there are various office-related accommodations—e.g. other disabilities ‘the right to employment in inclusive installing LED lighting rather than fluorescent lighting, settings and the right to reasonable accommodation and ensuring that the walls have cream or pastel colours ra- support to enable them to work effectively’. However, ther than bright colours—that will help to protect many, none of these documents recognize a right to workspace if not most, of these individuals from sensory overload. accommodations for non-autistic individuals with SPD, At this point, a critic might argue that, whether rea- as SPD is not currently recognized as a stand-alone dis- sonable accommodations for hypersensitive office- ability by medical authorities such as the American workers ought to be legally mandatory will depend on Psychiatric Association (Reis et al., 2017). whether there are less restrictive (i.e. more freedom- Besides failing to accommodate people with SPD, respecting) alternatives available, and add that such there is another way in which existing disability laws alternatives exist. On this view, states could simply use and acts fall short of the legal provisions that I am advo- media campaigns in order to encourage employers to cating. This shortcoming consist of the fact that they make their offices more hospitable towards (future) require that reasonable accommodations be made only workers with overdeveloped senses, and possible offer once autistic workers have either informed their employ- them subsidies for doing so. er of their autism and of any special needs that might My response is that, while such measures might suffice come with it, including ones for special protections from in a more ideal world, this is unlikely to be the case within sensory overload, or demonstrated such needs through contemporary societies. For one thing, the fact that their behaviour and functioning (Hensel, 2017: 94–95). hypersensitivity is a largely invisible and unknown dis- There are two problems with this approach as compared ability makes it reasonable to expect that, even if media THE RIGHT TO A HYPERSENSITIVITY-FRIENDLY WORKSPACE 285 campaigns were launched to raise awareness of it, a 6. An example of such subsidies may be found among proportion of employers would remain ignorant of its the Disabled Access Credit in the US, which provides existence and of the ways in which hypersensitive office- credit for small businesses to cover expenditures for workers could be accommodated. For another, simply the ‘purpose of providing access to persons with having this knowledge by no means guarantees that disabilities’ (IRS, 2020). employers will make (enough of) such accommoda- 7. And it is noteworthy that no less than 76–90 per cent tions, as many may fear that spending money on this of autists are estimated to be unemployed across the will make their organization less competitive. But if these European Union compared to 11.5 per cent of the concerns are warranted, then notwithstanding the general population (Autism Europe, 2014). strong presumptive reasons against the use of state co- 8. 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Autism and the Right to a Hypersensitivity-Friendly Workspace

de Vries, Bouke
Public Health Ethics , Volume 14 (3): 7 – Aug 1, 2021
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PUBLIC HEALTH ETHICS VOLUME 14 ISSUE 3 2021 281–287 281 • • • Autism and the Right to a Hypersensitivity- Friendly Workspace Bouke de Vries *, Umea˚ University and KU Leuven *Postdoctoral Research fellow, Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Humanishuset, Umea˚ University, 907 36 Umea˚, Sweden. Email: bouke.devries@umu.se. Many individuals on the autism spectrum are hypersensitive to certain sensory stimuli. For this group, as well as for non-autistic individuals with sensory processing disorders, being exposed to e.g. fluorescent lights, perfume odours, and various sounds and noises can be real torment. In this article, I consider the normative implications of such offence for the design of office spaces, which is a topic that has not received any attention from philosophers. After identifying different ways in which the senses of hypersensitive workers might be protected within these spaces, I show that many of such accommodations can be made at reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be a legal requirement. explosion in my ear. Minor noises that most people The Challenges of Being can tune out drove me to distraction. When I was in college, my roommate’s hair dryer sounded like Hypersensitive ajet plane taking off (Grandin, 2009: 63). Virtually all of us encounter things from time to time As well as sound, hypersensitive reactions are often that we find noisy, smelly or visually off-putting. For triggered by visual stimuli. Consider the following testi- most of us, such experiences do not have a major impact mony by Lori Sealy, a musician from Mississippi: on our lives. As scholars such as Joel Feinberg would put it, they offend us without compromising our well-being My visual experience is [.. .] rather radical. Bright light can be painful — honestly, any light can be and ability to function to such a degree as to cause us painful and I often compensate with sunglasses. I harm (Feinberg, 1988). can also get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of Things are different for those who are hypersensitive imagery that my mind is attempting to process at to sensory input, i.e. for those who have an overdevel- one time. I take in everything in a panoramic oped capacity for hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling and/ sense — and that sometimes makes it hard for or tasting. Many individuals with autism spectrum con- me to focus on the central thing I’m supposed ditions (ASC) or, as some prefer to refer to themselves, to see (Sealy, 2016). 1 2 ‘autists’, fall into this category. However, not every Still another common form of hypersensitivity person with hypersensitivity is also autistic according involves overreaction to smells. For example, Donna to several recent studies, which have found that children Williams, an Australian writer, recollects how the per- with a sensory processing disorder (SPD) ‘show atypical fume of one specific woman: sensory behaviours to the same or greater degree as ASC children’ but without displaying the latter’s primary lan- Made the inside of my nose feel like it had been walled up with clay up to my eyebrows. Her per- guage and social deficits (Owen et al., 2013; Chang et al., fume burned my lungs; my mouth tasted like I 2014; Reis et al., 2017; Tavassoli et al., 2018). had eaten a bunch of sickly smelling flowers Being hypersensitive can, and frequently does, affect (Williams, 1998: 57). individuals in highly negative ways. Temple Grandin, a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Exactly how hypersensitive individuals react to these recounts: and other sensory stimuli (e.g. ones involving touch and taste) varies. Apart from the fact that there are inter- When I was little, loud noises were [...]aproblem, personal differences (Simpson, 2016), the same hyper- often feeling like a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve. sensitive individual might respond differently to a given They actually caused pain. I was scared to death of balloons popping, because the sound was like an sensory stimulus depending on the context (Bogdashina doi:10.1093/phe/phab021 Advance Access publication on 1 August 2021 V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 282 DE VRIES and Casanova, 2016: 96–99). Still, reactions like the ones employers should only be required to accommodate just mentioned are common among this group, and hypersensitive office-workers if it is possible for them might in extreme cases result in a partial or full shut- to do so. To show that it is, consider first some of the down of sensory channels, leaving the overstimulated ways in which they might protect hyper-auditory person partially or wholly incapacitated (Bogdashina employees from sensory overload. One way in which and Casanova, 2016: 70). they may do this is by installing carpet flooring or soft Whereas being hypersensitive can, and usually does, flooring, which are less noisy than laminated flooring hamper people’s welfare and ability to function within so- (National Autistic Society, 2018). Another way is for ciety, then, the question of what moral duties, if any, states them to allocate offices to hyper-auditory workers that have to help protect those with overdeveloped senses has are not in the vicinity of photocopiers, shredders, print- not been investigated by scholars. In this article, I help to fill ers; and heating, ventilation and air conditioning sys- this lacuna by considering the normative implications of tems (Gaines et al., 2016: 163). Furthermore, when hypersensitivity for the design of office spaces. Doing so is choosing locations for future office buildings, they could important, as research has shown that a large proportion of seek to avoid locations near railways, busy commercial autistic employees struggle with sensory overload at work sites, and roadways with high volumes of traffic insofar (e.g. Beardon and Edmonds, 2007; Baldwin et al., 2014; as this does not interfere with key organizational objec- Lorenz et al., 2016; Hayward et al., 2018). For example, a tives, such as being easily reachable by clients (Pedder & report by Beardon and Edmonds (2007) found that, among Scampton Architects, 2017). 237 UK-nationals with Asperger Syndrome (AS) who had In order to accommodate employees with olfactory filled out a questionnaire about living with AS, over a third hyper sensibilities, some authors have recommended reported this problem. To gain a sense of the kinds of sen- that employers use a background fragrance that drives sory issues that these individuals faced, consider some of out the smells of perfumes and deodorants (Clements their comments: and Zarkowska, 2000: 80). An alternative measure would be for them to forbid their workers from wearing i. ‘Hate noise, but endured 10 years in an open plan staffroom, to my acute daily discomfort.’ (strong-smelling) perfume and deodorant. However, ii. ‘I cannot cope with excessive/odd noise—both from since this measure is considerably more intrusive, colleagues warbling (sorry, I don’t mean to be rude) or some might favour the previous measure, possibly com- from high-pitched electronic and similar machinery.’ bined with a policy that encourages employees to eschew iii. ‘Any kind of noise can be annoying some days. All wearing (strong-smelling) perfume and deodorant with- loud noise is painful always.’ out forcing them to do so. iv. ‘Fluorescent lights make me ill.’ Still another set of office-space accommodations v. ‘Sensitive to noise, light, smells etc etc. I need to addresses the sensory needs of hyper-visual employees. work in a quiet environment, preferably on my One way in which this may be done is by painting the own with as little artificial lighting as possible and office walls in low-arousal colours, such as cream and no strong odours.’ pastel shades (Gaines et al., 2016: 61). Another way involves installing non-fluorescent lights within these The remainder of this article is structured as follows. I spaces, as some hypersensitive individuals have such ac- begin by showing that there are various ways in which curate sight that they can perceive a 60-cycle flicker, employers might accommodate the sensory needs of which might cause them to suffer headaches or worse hypersensitive workers within office spaces. Next, I sug- (Grandin, 2009: 70). gest that many of these accommodations can be made at At this point, it ought to be noted that, even in the reasonable cost, before arguing that doing so ought to be best-located and best-designed offices, sensory overload legally required. is not always avoidable. As such, it can be highly useful for organizations to have a room in which those with Office-Space Accommodations for overstimulated senses can retreat in order to calm down. Such rooms ought to be low in stimuli, and are ideally Hypersensitive Employees: Some used exclusively for this purpose (Simpson, 2016). Examples Alternatively, or in addition, a garden might be used as a place of retreat, as might a tent or a part of a room that Congruent with the well-known dictum, ‘ought implies can’ (see e.g. Vranas, 2018), I assume in this article that is segregated with book cases (Gaines et al., 2016: 60). THE RIGHT TO A HYPERSENSITIVITY-FRIENDLY WORKSPACE 283 monotonous jobs that require high levels of accuracy The Case for Accommodating such as coding and laboratory work (Hagner and Hypersensitive Employees Cooney, 2005; Solomon, 2020). What about cases where (certain ways of) accommo- Having looked at several examples of office-space dating the sensory needs of hypersensitive office- accommodations for hypersensitive employees, it bears workers do impose significant costs on employers on mentioning that, just because this group would benefit both the short-term and long-term? Some might say from such accommodations does not entail that their that it would be problematic for this group to incur employers should be legally required to make them. In such costs, or simply to do so above a certain threshold. order to determine whether this is the case, one must also Apart from the fact that it might hinder competition by consider the costs of such requirements, which some creating additional barriers for people to start small busi- critics might argue would be excessive. nesses, they may argue that everyone in society has a duty While there are clearly limits to how much employers of justice to help ensure that fellow citizens and residents or, for that matter, states (see below), can be expected to have fair opportunities for societal participation (cf. invest in protecting office-workers from sensory over- Anderson, 1999; Rawls, 1999; Mason, 2006), including load, I believe that the current objection is too strong. fair opportunities for participation in the labour market The easiest way of showing this is to point out the prob- (Brown, 2021), and that, because of this, the costs of lems with its minor premise. Upon reflection, it turns accommodating hypersensitive office-workers should out that there are various things that employers can do in be partially, if not fully, covered by public subsidies. order to protect their workers from sensory overload at I will not try to settle here how, if at all, the costs of no significant expense. For example, allocating the quiet- reasonable accommodations for hypersensitive workers est offices in the building to hypersensitive workers need ought to be divided between employers and the state, not cost anything. Likewise, having the office walls which is an issue that is well beyond this article’s scope painted in cream or pastel shades is not necessarily (for a discussion of it, see e.g. Moss and Malin, 1998). more expensive than having them painted in bright col- The point that I want to make is more modest, namely ours, just as using LED lighting is not necessarily more that even when the costs of (some) office-space accom- expensive than using fluorescent lighting. modations for hypersensitive workers are unlikely to be But even when certain ways of accommodating the completely off-set over time, there are good grounds for sensory needs of hypersensitive office-workers impose thinking that the accommodations should be made costs on the short-term—think, for instance, of a case nonetheless when the costs of doing so are not too great where an employer replaces the laminate flooring of an (whether this is the case will depend on many factors that office building with carpet flooring even though it could I cannot begin to discuss in this article, including on have been used a few years longer—these accommoda- whether the costs in question are absorbed by the em- tions will sometimes repay themselves over time. One rea- ployer, the state, or both, and, in case of the employer, on son for this is that offices that are low in stimuli have how large the organization is). To see this, notice that, been found to have a tendency to increase general prod- although there are other valuable goods on which this uctivity (see the studies cited in Al Horr et al., 2016: 383 money could be spent—e.g. employers might invest it in and Kamarulzaman et al., 2011: 265), which may not just offering better services or in making better products, be because they make hypersensitive workers more pro- whereas states might use it to alleviate child poverty or ductive, but also because they might enhance the output reduce carbon emissions, or simply leave the money for of other workers, including that of individuals who are tax-payers to spend as they see fit—accommodating the highly sensitive and who are thought to make up approxi- sensory needs of hypersensitive workers is of great moral mately 15–20 per cent of the population (Boterberg and importance. One reason for this was mentioned when I Warreyn, 2016). Another reason is that hypersensitivity- noted that, for many hypersensitive individuals, working friendly organizations are more likely to attract, as well as in a hypersensitivity-unfriendly environment takes a to retain, high-functioning autistic workers. Since these heavy toll of their health and welfare. In addition to workers generally have greater-than-average abilities to being problematic in itself, especially given the large detect patterns, remember large amounts of information amounts of time that people spent on the job (for ex- and concentrate on repetitive tasks (Scott et al., 2017; ample, some estimates suggest that Americans spend 25 Solomon, 2020), which come on top of relatively high per cent of their lives at work; Warr and Clapperton, levels of trustworthiness and integrity (Scott et al., 2017), 2009), these harms may render it difficult for them to many of them are especially qualified to perform stay in employment and thereby threaten their access to 284 DE VRIES various work-related goods. One might think here not to one that requires employers to make certain accom- modations for hypersensitive workers regardless of only of remuneration and employment-based health in- surance, but also of a professional identity that can whether they currently have such workers or know to have such workers, about which more shortly. imbue their life with meaning and structure (Gheaus One is that some individuals never tell their employer and Herzog, 2016) and of regular social interaction, about their autism, which may leave the latter ignorant which, apart from being valuable in its own right, has of any autism-related special needs that they might have. been shown to be a petri dish for the development of Reviewing the literature on workplace accommodations friendships (e.g. Sias and Cahill, 1998). for people on the spectrum, Lindsay et al. (2021) found that, among four studies that included rates of workplace Policy Implications disclosure, between 25 per cent and 69 per cent of autistic employees had not disclosed their autism to their em- My aim in this final section is to consider in some detail ployer, which, in spite of the small sample sizes, points to the policy implications of my arguments thus far. The a real problem. In most cases, this reluctance was moti- most important implication is that in countries where vated by fears of being stigmatized and of suffering dis- there are currently no legal requirements to accommo- crimination (e.g. Morris et al., 2015), which causes some date hypersensitive workers, legislation ought to be autists to try to hide their condition by mimicking the introduced that mandates such accommodations when behaviours of their neurotypical peers (Lindsay et al., they can be made at reasonable cost. As far as I am aware, 2019). no such legislation currently exists. There are, to be sure, The other problem with the current approach is to do countries where employers have legal obligations to ac- with the fact that decisions about the locations of office commodate autistic employees, who it was noted in the buildings, as well as ones about their floor covering, first section often suffer from one or more forms of lighting, and so on, have a big impact on how hypersensitivity. In the US, the Rehabilitation Act of hypersensitivity-friendly a workplace is, but are difficult 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and/or costly to overturn once implemented. Because of require governmental organizations on both the federal this, it is highly important that certain accommodations level and state level to provide reasonable accommoda- be made even before hypersensitive individuals have tions to people with disabilities, including to autistic joined the workforce or are known to have done so, people (Hensel, 2017), insofar as this renders these indi- which is something that legislation can help to achieve. viduals qualified to do specific jobs. In Europe, both the For although the precise accommodations that hyper- EU and several of its individual member states have rati- sensitive workers need will vary from one hypersensitive fied the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with worker to the next, we have seen in the first section that Disabilities of 2008, which gives people with autism and there are various office-related accommodations—e.g. other disabilities ‘the right to employment in inclusive installing LED lighting rather than fluorescent lighting, settings and the right to reasonable accommodation and ensuring that the walls have cream or pastel colours ra- support to enable them to work effectively’. However, ther than bright colours—that will help to protect many, none of these documents recognize a right to workspace if not most, of these individuals from sensory overload. accommodations for non-autistic individuals with SPD, At this point, a critic might argue that, whether rea- as SPD is not currently recognized as a stand-alone dis- sonable accommodations for hypersensitive office- ability by medical authorities such as the American workers ought to be legally mandatory will depend on Psychiatric Association (Reis et al., 2017). whether there are less restrictive (i.e. more freedom- Besides failing to accommodate people with SPD, respecting) alternatives available, and add that such there is another way in which existing disability laws alternatives exist. On this view, states could simply use and acts fall short of the legal provisions that I am advo- media campaigns in order to encourage employers to cating. This shortcoming consist of the fact that they make their offices more hospitable towards (future) require that reasonable accommodations be made only workers with overdeveloped senses, and possible offer once autistic workers have either informed their employ- them subsidies for doing so. er of their autism and of any special needs that might My response is that, while such measures might suffice come with it, including ones for special protections from in a more ideal world, this is unlikely to be the case within sensory overload, or demonstrated such needs through contemporary societies. For one thing, the fact that their behaviour and functioning (Hensel, 2017: 94–95). hypersensitivity is a largely invisible and unknown dis- There are two problems with this approach as compared ability makes it reasonable to expect that, even if media THE RIGHT TO A HYPERSENSITIVITY-FRIENDLY WORKSPACE 285 campaigns were launched to raise awareness of it, a 6. An example of such subsidies may be found among proportion of employers would remain ignorant of its the Disabled Access Credit in the US, which provides existence and of the ways in which hypersensitive office- credit for small businesses to cover expenditures for workers could be accommodated. For another, simply the ‘purpose of providing access to persons with having this knowledge by no means guarantees that disabilities’ (IRS, 2020). employers will make (enough of) such accommoda- 7. And it is noteworthy that no less than 76–90 per cent tions, as many may fear that spending money on this of autists are estimated to be unemployed across the will make their organization less competitive. But if these European Union compared to 11.5 per cent of the concerns are warranted, then notwithstanding the general population (Autism Europe, 2014). strong presumptive reasons against the use of state co- 8. 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