Job Gains For Disabled Fall Short Despite Landmark Legislation, Few Disabled People Can Find Work
Chip Smith reports to work each morning at 8. On arrival, he carefully examines, page-by-page, a small blue photo album whose covers are worn. Inside are more than a dozen Polaroid pictures, showing every step, every function of Smith’s job.
Smith, a small, wiry 30-something man, is deaf and autistic, and by most accounts a working wonder. Because he cannot hear or speak and knows little sign language, the album serves as a personal work guide, a combination training manual and daily job description.
Within minutes of the work day’s start, Smith is off and running. His is no glory job. He is responsible for cleaning the warehouse and assembly room at Boulder-based Data Storage Marketing Inc., a custom computer manufacturer. Smith is also responsible for collecting and sorting recyclable material, and labeling certain computer parts. He earns significantly more than the minimum wage and recently received a raise because of an outstanding performance review.
“I hope he stays forever,” says Smith’s boss, warehouse manager Jeff Mills.
But Smith is one of the lucky ones, someone with a disability who also has a job. Most people like him - roughly 66 percent of people with disabilities nationwide - are unemployed. Not because they can’t or don’t want to work, but because, despite landmark legislation that was supposed to open the workplace to people with disabilities, the average American company remains closed to them. The situation has changed little if any during the past 10 years, studies show.
Disability professionals say the problem, in fact, may have gotten worse since the Americans With Disabilities Act was enacted six years ago. Some studies indicate employment levels have even shrunk slightly. “What we’re seeing is a backlash against the Americans With Disabilities Act,” says Faith Gross, an employment consultant and ADA expert who works for the Rocky Mountain Resource Training Institute in Denver.
“People are afraid that if they hire someone with a disability they’re going to get sued,” she says. That fear keeps most disability professionals working double-time, trying to dispel the misperceptions about the ADA and to explain what is, in reality, a complex, far-reaching civil rights law.
“The ADA has, absolutely, made employers more reluctant to hire,” says Bob Lawhead, director of Boulder County Enterprises Inc., the agency that helped Chip Smith find his job at Data Storage Marketing. “It has presented employers with a list of questions they can and can’t ask (in the hiring process). And that makes people nervous.”
Boulder County Enterprises Inc., a statefunded agency, specializes in providing what’s called supported employment for people with disabilities. That means there is a vocational counselor who helps determine aptitude, capabilities, and likes and dislikes of the prospective employee.
The counselor also does all the training once a person has been hired for the job and serves as backup if problems arise once the person is at work.
About 120 people with disabilities work through Boulder County Enterprises Inc. Another 30 are going through the vocational evaluation. About 75 are on the waiting list for the agency’s services. Several other Boulder County agencies - the Center For People With Disabilities, Labor Source Inc. and the Chinook House - also provide employment help to people with disabilities.
But the work of these agencies and hundreds of others nationwide has done little to reduce the ranks of the unemployed.
Of the 49 million people in the United States who have disabilities, roughly 32.4 million are unemployed, according to a 1995 Harris Poll.
Slightly more than 100,000 are able to work through such supported employment programs as the one run by Lawhead, according to the newsletter Supported Employment Lines.
The number of people helped through such programs is growing dramatically, but the numbers pale in comparison to the number of people with disabilities who want to work. The 1995 Harris Poll commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization on Disability shows that 79 percent of people surveyed wanted to work, up from 66 percent in 1986.
Marty Walsh, director of the CEO Council for the National Organization on Disability, says the employment problem is compounded by economic changes as well.
“Look at what’s happened in the overall economy during the past five years. Traditional employers of people with disabilities have been the government and large corporations. Both have been downsizing,” Walsh says.
“Small business has not traditionally been a major employer of people with disabilities,” Walsh says. In fact, the 1995 Harris Poll showed that while the number of large- and medium-sized companies with plans to hire people with disabilities has grown slightly, the number of small companies with hiring plans has shrunk.
Walsh says the challenge of disability professionals is to change the mind-set that continues to bar the disabled from the workplace. “The barriers are not the dollars (involved in accommodating people with disabilities). They are the attitudes of companies and their employees. And the only way the barriers come down is when employers and other workers run into capable employees who are also disabled.”
But there are powerful misperceptions about disabled workers and the ADA that serve to exclude the disabled from the workplace, says Denver ADA consultant Gross.
Among the most destructive notions are that the cost of complying with ADA is extraordinarily high; that someone with a disability who isn’t performing cannot be fired; and that disabled workers pose a safety risk to themselves and others.
None of those assumptions is true, Gross says.
But fear of lawsuits continues to dominate the corporate conscience where disabled workers are concerned. According to the U.S. Justice Department, the ADA has spawned about 650 lawsuits nationwide during the past five years, a number disability advocates claim is low.
And more than 50,000 ADA-related complaints have been filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Few of those complaints center on hiring, however. The top complaints at the EEOC involve disabilities acquired on the job. The most common to date are back injuries, followed by stress and carpel tunnel syndrome.
For example, Boulderite Margaret Chancellor, a single mother of two, suffered severe head and back injuries in an on-the-job accident 11 years ago. She has had difficulty finding work ever since the accident.
But with state assistance, she is returning to school to become a corrections counselor. It is her dream job, one she believes she will be able to perform successfully.
Even disabled people with jobs say the prospect of finding new ones is daunting. David Dean, an administrative clerk at the National Institute of Standards in Boulder has a good job, one he has held for more than 15 years. Dean, who is developmentally disabled, earns more than a brother who works for a local recycling company.
Sharon Sandera, a 25-year NIST veteran who was recently honored for her work with people with disabilities, supervises David Dean and another clerical worker at NIST, David Basset, who is deaf and aphasic. Aphasia is a condition in which stimuli don’t always reach the brain. Sandera communicates with Basset using sign language.
“They save a lot of people here time and work,” Sandera says of Dean and Basset. “They have both made careers of it. And they require very little supervision. Sometimes if there’s a new job, it requires a little more training but that’s all … They bring out a lot of compassion in all of us here,” Sandera says. “They get more out of their potential than the rest of us.”
xxxx ABOUT THE ADA The Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination against anyone with a disability and mandates that most public places be physically accessible. It also mandates that employers provide necessary accommodations to qualified disabled people so that they can do their jobs. The act does not apply to companies with fewer than 15 employees.