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The Accommodation I Lost in 2024

  • Writer: Mark Fukae
    Mark Fukae
  • 3 days ago
  • 2 min read

A bright teal digital campaign graphic for Professionals Who Care. On the right side, a large yellow circle contains the green text: "Our Lives On Hold: She Has Got to Get Up". In the upper left, a tilted square photograph shows a yellow flower resting on a wheelchair armrest with a blurred guitarist in a sunlit background. A white quote in the bottom left reads: "FMLA tells you if you're allowed to be gone. It says nothing about whether you're allowed to be flexible." The "Professionals Who Care" logo sits in the bottom right corner.
When a care crisis hits-like a sudden fall-federal tools like FMLA only protect your right to be entirely absent. They do absolutely nothing to protect the micro-flexibility a working family actually needs to coordinate medical arrivals, manage rehab transfers, and keep a loved one connected to the joy of everyday life. Without a protected statutory floor like the Colorado CARE Act, caregivers remain completely unprotected from blanket workplace policies that can sweep their stability away in an instant.

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy - Professionals Who Care


Why Mark Fukae built the Colorado CARE Act - and the week that proved why it's needed


One week ago, PWC's Director of Advocacy Mark Fukae's mother-in-law fell at a longtime social gathering - a split-second moment of independence, not a lapse in her caregiver's attention - fractured her hip, and spent four days in the hospital before transferring to a rehab facility. A week that included a hallway conversation about surgical risk and end-of-life planning, and, days later, a courtyard concert and a flower from a stranger.


The full account - published today in Our Lives On Hold, "She Has Got to Get Up" - is also the week Mark filed for federal FMLA, the only workplace tool currently available to him. The piece discloses, for the first time, why that's true: in 2022 and 2023, Mark had a formal, cabinet-level-approved workplace accommodation built around his caregiving responsibilities. In 2024, a blanket return-to-office policy - applied to all employees, with no individual review - eliminated it. He has had no accommodation since.


That sequence is, in Mark's words, the exact mechanism the Colorado CARE Act was built to interrupt. A formal accommodation, approved through proper channels, can still be erased overnight by an unrelated company-wide policy, because nothing in current Colorado law requires an employer to even have a conversation with an affected caregiving employee before that happens. HR enforced the policy as written - not as a failure on HR's part, but because HR enforces whatever leadership decides.


The CARE Act wouldn't override a company's right to set policies like RTO. What it would guarantee is a required, documented, good-faith conversation about caregiving needs before an accommodation is swept away by a blanket change - a floor that survives leadership and policy turnover, instead of a discretionary grant that doesn't.


The fiscal stakes scale with HR1's Medicaid work requirements: families without FMLA eligibility, FAMLI access, or a surviving workplace accommodation don't get a hard week when a fall happens - they get the end of a caregiving arrangement, often straight into care costing Colorado roughly $33,000 more per person per year than home-based care, by the state's own figures.



Mark Fukae is Director of Advocacy at Professionals Who Care and founder of CASI: Caregiver Advocacy Support Initiative. He is a registered Colorado volunteer lobbyist and a stakeholder on the Colorado Medicaid Commission.

 
 
 

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