The person whose reputation precedes him/her has the disadvantage of having one’s actions immediately placed into categories defined by the perspective of prior judgments. And so it is with Federal and Postal employees who begin to exhibit chronic medical conditions which impact one’s ability/inability to perform one or more of the essential elements of one’s job.
The Federal or Postal employee who begins to use up sick leave; who is viewed as doing less than his or her coworkers; who has taken LWOP and invoked the protection of FMLA; the reputation itself becomes magnified, to the extent that nothing which one does, accomplishes, or sets out to do is judged on its own merits; rather, it is within the perspective of, “Well, you know how it is with that person…”
Many a career path have been ruined because of the inability or unwillingness of an organization, an agency or a department to allow for a recuperative period of rehabilitation for a worker who suffers from a medical condition. Medical conditions have an insidious way of not only debilitating a person physically and mentally; moreover, it infects the very environment of the workplace with gossip and malicious suspicions of motives and intentions.
Federal Disability Retirement is an option available for Federal and Postal employees who suffer from a medical condition such that the condition prevents one from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s job, and further, if the condition will last a minimum of 12 months. The chronicity of the condition is often more than physical or mental; it may well have extended into the nefarious universe of workplace hostility, and such an infection can only be cured by the extraction of the Federal or Postal worker from the workplace itself.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Esquire
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 