ADA: A Job Not Done (Yet)

Americans With Disabilities Act: A job not done (yet)
15 years after its inception, the ADA has brought changes, but many still
are excluded, particularly on the job front Friday, July 15, 2005

By Jim McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In the 15 years since the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into
law, there have been major improvements in making public places and services
more accessible to people who live with physical impairments.

A group of people sit in their wheelchairs in front of the Capitol building
in Washington on March 12, 1990, to show support for a bill that became the
Americans with Disabilities Act.

The law, intended to ensure equal rights for the disabled, has brought a
host of changes in workplaces, transportation, communication and other
areas. Companies must make reasonable attempts to accommodate workers with
physical impartments, while buildings, transportation and other public
facilities must be accessible to all.

But even as the ADA is slowly driving changes enabling more people with
significant mental and physical disabilities to live independently, the
effects of exclusion are still felt, particularly in employment. That's
because the ADA, which became law on July 26, 1990, is a significant yet
imperfect piece of legislation, Mary A. Crossley, the new dean at the
University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said yesterday.

"I would not characterize it as a complete success, but I wouldn't
characterize it as a failure. I think it is an important piece of
legislation whose promise has not been fully realized,'' said Crossley, a
scholar in disability and health law, who came to Pitt last week from the
Florida State University College of Law.

"We still have a lot to do," Crossley said. "But [the ADA] is something I
celebrate as an important recognition that people with disabilities are just
like the rest of us, except they have some kind of disability, and they
should not be excluded or segregated or face limitations that people without
disabilities don't face."

Many of the architectural changes brought by the ADA have been embraced by a
broader group of Americans. Sidewalk curb cuts and ramps designed to help
people with disabilities, for example, are used by parents pushing
strollers, workers delivering packages and travelers pulling suitcases on
wheels.

Likewise, captioning on television designed for people who are deaf or hard
of hearing is used by those not hearing impaired in noisy places like sports
bars. And new building and product designs that are ADA compliant have
universal appeal -- an adjustable podium, a stairless entrance, a computer
that can respond to voice commands or a voting machine that can read the
ballot in multiple languages are enjoyed by everyone.

Mary A. Crossley is the University of Pittsburgh's new law school dean. But
all those visible changes have yet to carry over where it perhaps matters
most for people with disabilities -- the job market.

The unemployment rate among people with serious disabilities is the highest
of any group of Americans, no matter their education or qualifications, with
roughly 70 percent of working-age people with significant disabilities not
working -- a level that has remained constant for about two decades,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

"To a lot of us, that is disappointing,'' said Andrew Imparato, president
and chief executive officer of the American Association of People with
Disabilities.

Of 49.7 million Americans of all ages with disabilities, about two-thirds
have disabilities that are classified as serious or significant.

The Census data is corroborated by a Harris survey commissioned by the
National Organization on Disability that last year found only 35 percent of
people with disabilities reported being employed either full or part time,
compared with 78 percent of those who do not have disabilities.

Three times as many people with disabilities live in poverty -- with annual
household incomes below $15,000 -- than people without disabilities, the
survey found. They are also more likely to need transportation and to go
without needed health care.

It should be no surprise, then, that people with disabilities are less
likely to socialize, eat out or attend religious services than their
non-disabled counterparts, Only 34 percent of those surveyed said they were
very satisfied with their lives.

Joyce Bender, an executive recruiter from Pittsburgh who has made a national
business out of finding jobs for qualified people with disabilities, called
the high unemployment among people with disabilities a "national failure."

For Bender, who discovered she had epilepsy 21 years ago after a hemorrhage
in a movie house, the ADA means she need not disclose in an employment
application that her seizure disorder is controlled with medication.

But she said employers 15 years after the act's passage still regularly ask
her to detail what disabilities her employment clients have -- a question
that is barred by the act as discriminatory.

"We still have a long way to go,'' said Bender, who operates employment
services in 13 states and expects to hire 100 new employees with significant
disabilities this year.

The problem, of course, is bigger than a legal statute. Although some people
blame the ADA for failing to curb high unemployment, Imparato said that is
not quite fair.

The ADA did not -- and was not meant to -- create all of the employment and
training programs that would be needed to lift up people with disabilities
who are undereducated so they could be competitive in job searches.

The simple fact is, there are people with disabilities who are trained and
qualified yet don't even get a chance to compete for jobs. Imparato said
employers have not gone after people with disabilities in the same way they
compete to find qualified women or minority applications.

"That is the kind of thing I'm hoping will change,'' he said. "I think of it
as almost generational. My children are going to be less likely to
discriminate than my generation, and hopefully their children will be less
likely to discriminate than they."

Much of the continued discrimination can be traced to stereotypes about
people with disabilities, said Clifford Payne, a vice president of
Accessibility Development Associates Inc., a Pittsburgh company that advises
business, government and other clients on how to cope with the ADA.

"The good thing is that the ADA has really changed society. Go to any
shopping mall and you will see people there independently in wheel chairs,
with their friends and family groups. You didn't used to see that,'' Payne
said.

Some employers, he said, continue to drag their feet over making physical
accommodations to help people with disabilities. But Payne believes negative
attitudes are a larger issue.

"The biggest obstacle is the stereotypes about people with disabilities,
that people with disabilities will be more expensive to hire, that once I
hire them I can't fire them, and my personal favorite, I don't want to bring
a crazy person into my workplace,'' Payne said.

"People with mental health disabilities face an incredible amount of
prejudice and that includes people who take medicine for things like
depression."

Since the ADA's inception, there have been several court decisions,
including a few by the U.S. Supreme Court, that have narrowed the class of
people who are protected by the law.

In a 2002 case involving Toyota Motor Manufacturing, the court ruled than an
assembly line worker with carpal tunnel syndrome who was fired because of
her attendance record was not entitled to protection under the act because
it was not clear that she had substantial impairment of any major life
activity.

A similar rationale was used in a 1999 case in which a truck driver for a
supermarket chain was fired for not meeting visual standards. The company
refused to rehire him even after he obtained a waiver from the standards.

Also in 1999, the Supreme Court found that severely myopic twins who had
unsuccessfully sought pilot jobs with United Airlines were not actually
disabled because their vision could be corrected by eyeglasses.

Those decisions have led some advocates of people with disabilities to call
on Congress to legislatively update the ADA to counter the negative effects
of court decisions and make it more inclusive.

Crossley, Pitt's new law school dean, said amendments to the act may be
necessary but she suggested there are other steps to consider, including
gains in education and the passage of time, that could further help to end
discrimination and bring people with disabilities into society as equal
partners.

"Most of us, if we live long enough, will some day find an individual with
disabilities in our families."