Uber, CVS, and Rite Aid in the news over disability discrimination
The week after the Rite Aid settlement with the Department of Justice, Uber and CVS are on the disability discrimination hotseat
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Personal opinion only, not the opinion of my employer.
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Rite Aid settled a case last week with the Department of Justice, which required them to make their COVID portal and web pages accessible and commit to training and ongoing efforts to keep the data accessible. This was the first time in more than six years that the DOJ had undertaken such a case. It was hoped by the disability rights community that this case was the sign of a more active presence by the DOJ in disability discrimination cases.
I have written several articles, each with a specific point of view on this case:
The DOJ / Uber case
It did not take long for last week’s hope to begin to bloom. This week, the DOJ *sued* Uber over their five-year history of charging wait fees for people with disabilities if they took more than two minutes to get into the rideshare once it arrived. I can tell you from personal experience as a rideshare user who also uses a wheelchair, I can be precisely at the appointed location before the rideshare arrives, and it takes me more than two minutes to get into the car.
- The rideshare drive doesn’t always stop where their passenger is. When (not if) that is the case, it generally takes a person with a disability longer to get to the vehicle than a person without a disability. But the driver has already marked themselves as having arrived, which starts the “first two minutes are free” countdown clock ticking.
- Putting the wheelchair in the trunk, getting into the car — it all takes longer, and that’s assuming that you don’t…
