In both the United States and Canada, the concept of reasonable accommodation first emerged in equality law as a means of handling religious diversity. It was then applied to other grounds of discrimination, most notably disability. In the European Union, the evolution of antidiscrimination law is following a different path: a duty of reasonable accommodation was for the first time established by the 2000 Employment Equality Directive (or Directive 2000/78/EC) but only with respect to disability. Nonetheless, the question whether a right to reasonable accommodation can be derived from the prohibition of discrimination based on religion laid down by the same Directive, or, alternatively, whether such right should be recognized in future European legislation is becoming increasingly salient.

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It has become commonplace within disability sociolegal scholarship to argue that, in the last 30 years, a new legal and policy approach to disability has emerged, leading to a paradigm shift from a social protection framework to an antidiscrimination model. Some authors have stressed, however, that the new model has not fully replaced the older social protection approach. Yet little is still known about how the coexistence of these different models impacts on the everyday experience of disability in the workplace and on potential legal mobilization. Based on interviews with workers with disabilities who mobilized the law to obtain reasonable accommodation in Belgium combined with an analysis of evolving Belgian legal schemes relating to disability, this article explores how interactions between social, labor, and antidiscrimination rights shape legal mobilization of persons with disabilities in the workplace. We find that individual's initial self‐identification as workers or persons with disabilities influences how they frame their claim and the kind of legal norms they refer to in a first stage but that both their identification and their rights consciousness evolve and change through the course of legal mobilization as they interact with various professionals and navigate between the different concepts and rights available in current law.