Oct, 2017

By Guest Blogger Jill Thomsen 

October is Disability Employment Awareness Month, a fitting time to look at the workplace issues that people with disabilities face on a day-to-day basis. This blog explores the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), current workplace standards, and how to build a more inclusive workforce to address equitable treatment of people with disabilities.

What is the American with Disabilities Act (ADA)?

Nearly thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush signed landmark legislation designed to make the U.S. more accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities. Among other requirements, the ADA mandates both nondiscrimination and reasonable accommodation in the workplace for the roughly thirteen percent of the U.S. population who report having a disability. Since 1990, legislation, executive orders, and court decisions continue to advance the cause of people with disabilities in the workplace, ultimately resulting in a more expansive definition of disability, increased disability employment litigation, and disability utilization goals for certain employers with federal contracts. The work continues. In July, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it would make $15 million in grants available to improve employment opportunities for people with disabilities.

Despite these efforts, much more needs to be done to make employment opportunities available and workplaces more inclusive.

People with Disabilities Face Excessive Unemployment Inequities

Employment is one of the greatest challenges facing Americans with disabilities. Unemployment rates for this population remain shockingly high. In 2016, more than ten percent of individuals with a disability were unemployed, almost twice that of those without a disability. (Unemployed individuals in this study were those who did not have a job, were available to work, and were actively looking for a job.)

Employees with disabilities were also far more likely than their non-disabled peers to work only part-time or become self-employed because their hours had been cut or they were unable to find full-time employment. Even those with college degrees are challenged in accessing employment as only one in four college students with disabilities can secure employment, leading to poverty rates twice the national average.

Those who do find employment also face lower earnings than their peers. When people with disabilities find work, their hourly, weekly, and monthly wages are substantially lower than those without disabilities. On average, employees with disabilities earn only 64 percent as much as those without disabilities.

Case in point: researchers at Rutgers University recently conducted an experiment by sending out job applications for more than 6,000 hypothetical accounting positions. Two-thirds of applicants disclosed a disability in their cover letters, one-third did not, and qualifications were otherwise equal. Appallingly, applicants with disabilities received 26 percent fewer responses from employers. Whether due to ignorance, stigma, or unconscious bias, employers are neglecting a vibrant, qualified, and available pool of talent.

Failure to Include Disability in Diversity Programs

Workforce inclusion efforts also tend to overlook disability. Philip Kahn-Pauli, the policy and practices director of the non-profit organization RespectAbility, states, “[Employers] think about race, gender and sexual orientation/identity . . . [t]hey do not think about disability. What they may not recognize is that disability is a natural part of the human experience and cuts across other barriers that divide us. . . . We are the only minority group that anyone can join at any time due to accident, illness or aging.”

To combat these trends, a growing number of companies are implementing outreach and inclusion programs explicitly targeting workers with disabilities. Not surprisingly, early estimates reveal that disability-specific services are in fact delivering the results-oriented outcomes valued by employers.

Best Practices for Including Disability Services in the Workplace

How to build and implement disability-specific services and protocols in your organization:

1. Centralize Your Accommodations Policy, Procedures, and Budget

Admittedly, the reasonable accommodation process might at times be time-consuming and complex. Managers also assume accommodations are costly and permanent even though research establishes otherwise. Given these variables and misconceptions, an internal resource specifically dedicated to disability compliance and inclusion ensures that accommodation decisions are appropriately personalized, documented, practical, and consistent.

 

2. Hire a Specialized Disability Recruiter

Increasingly, companies recognize the intricacies involved in successfully recruiting, hiring, and onboarding people with disabilities. An internal company recruiter or external community organization dedicated to workers with disabilities not only helps to fill the employment pipeline with qualified talent, but also provides customized guidance and coaching to both applicants and hiring managers throughout the selection and new hire process.

 

3. Develop a Disability Network or Dedicated Employee Resource Group

Approaches are varied, but most corporate disability networks count workers with disabilities and caregivers of those with disabilities amongst their membership. The types of disabilities represented run the gamut, from blindness, epilepsy, and autism to diabetes, cancer, and anxiety. Not only do disability networks provide both professional and personal support to their membership, but these groups also assist with larger corporate efforts on outreach and recruitment, mentorship, accessibility, and social responsibility.

4. Assess Your Disability Inclusivity

To truly understand a company’s culture of inclusion – strength of current practices and ideas for improvement – a disability survey is imperative. A few national disability organizations have created and currently employ such tools, some of which are free of charge. In addition, these organizations provide expertise on implementing recommended next steps and developing successful inclusion programs in a practical and cost-effective manner.

In celebration of Disability Employment Awareness Month, I hope you are encouraged to strengthen disability inclusion at your own company by improving the way you engage workers with disabilities. Employment enables all of us to lead full and productive lives. Given nearly thirty years of ADA legislation as well as the currently competitive landscape in the war for talent, it is high time to incorporate innovative and proven methods of disability inclusion into corporate practice.

Jill Thomsen is principal and founder of the Equal Opps Collaborative, where she builds partnerships, programs, and policy recommendations for employers, community organizations, education professionals, unions, and government agencies to establish pathways to in-demand, meaningful, and sustainable careers for underutilized populations.

Smooth Sailing. My alarm does its thing this morning at 5:45 am. Loving that coffee pot timer that has already done its thing and filled the house with the aroma of Starbucks Morning Joe. Enjoyed a peaceful warm yummy cup, since Mom was nice enough to take the dogs last night until I return tomorrow.

Smooth Sailing. Showered…dressed…and in the car and off to Hartsfield Atlanta Airport by 6:30 am. No traffic, if you can believe that…in ATLANTA. It keeps on being a smooth sailing morning with a great parking space and shuttle to pick me up, like clockwork.

Smooth Sailing. I love CLEAR: two fingers down on the piece of glass, scan my boarding pass and shuttled to the front of the TSA Pre-Check line.

Smooth Sailing.

My sailboat is ready to crash, and this is hard to write. I wasn’t going to write it. I didn’t want to even think about it. But I have to. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t. I’d love to pretend that this stuff only happens to others, to people who attend our unconscious bias training classes. But this is ME.

I chose a luggage X-ray line from the 3 available. I waited…kept waiting…for a spot to open in the new conveyor belt/grab a bin/put stuff in bin/push bin forward into an open spot system that Hartsfield is using.

I timed my push between two bins moving on the moving conveyer belt and when I did, created a jam. The TSA agent pushed my bin back and said, “I just announced to wait for me to tell you when to push your bin.”

I said, “Sorry!”

The black woman who had admonished me then said, “No you’re not.”

My sailboat crashed.

I said, “OH!”

Just one word, but if you could have heard my inflection, my righteous indignation, my mental vibration that was behind that one word, this is what you would have intuited.

How dare you! Who are you to scold me? Who do you think you are? I’m the customer, the Diamond Medallion, Two Million Miler. If you were really doing your job you would have managed the flow of this line much better and I would not have had to wait 60 seconds to get a spot with a bin to go through this stupid system.

Yes. If you could have recorded my thoughts that burst from my brain in that split second response, all of that was contained in my “OH!”

AND…her gender and color were in the formula too…OF COURSE…because they always are. My fast burst of superiority did include a fast and, usually, unexamined racial and gender based positioning on the ladder of societal pecking order.

Have I said this is hard to type? I’m carefully choosing each word now, unlike when I was engaging with the TSA Agent.

I can acknowledge what my ego/(me) blurted out this morning when a women doing her job decided to let me know that she didn’t think I was sorry; that I intentionally was rushing and being, perhaps, inconsiderate and pushy/entitled. Its much harder for me to acknowledge, that, on analysis now, sitting in my upgraded seat flying to NYC that I know my reaction would have been different if she was male and/or she was white. It’s impossible for me, right now, to play it out in my mind exactly to know what my reaction would be, but I know it would be different.

In that moment of her scolding of me, I looked down on her. I converted my slight shame of being “busted” for being pushy into a lightening fast judgment of her job, her authority and of HER…her humanity. That’s so hard to acknowledge.

My fingers are freezing up between each sentence.

I’m ashamed that my embedded privilege and nearly-always-unacknowledged-white-male-sense of superiority came flooding out of me in that moment of truth…that moment when my smooth sailing day was interrupted by a woman calling me on my obvious rude behavior.

And, I’ve been educating our workshop participants for over 3 years now that, it’s natural. To be human is to be biased. We see the world through a set of lenses that are uniquely ours, developed by our life journey, our background. We make sense of the world through pattern recognition. If we are not mindful, our conditioned patterns of implicitly biased associations, learned from our families, media, stereotypes and significant emotional events….our reptilian or “fast”/automatic pilot part of our brain pushes out a reaction and we say, “OH!”….or worse…when a black woman at the airport calls us out for not following instructions.

Or fill in the blank on what the incident is:

*a woman speaks confidently about her accomplishments in an job interview

*a person with a “thick” accent speaks up with an idea in the meeting

*a person of a different ethnicity moves into your lane without signaling or waiting their turn when you’re in a hurry

*a younger person keeps looking at their device during the meeting you’re running

Humans are biased. From those biases, we project assumptions, judgments and even characteristics onto others, often with little or no knowledge about that person’s motives, story, values, morals…or consideration of their humanity. (There’s that word again.)

Humanity. That’s the word I’m going to focus on today now that I’ve taken the time to write this down. For a few seconds, I forgot that word during my peaceful, smooth sailing morning. If I could replay it, I would said: “I need to slow down, I’m sorry.” Or “ Thank you. I apologize, I wasn’t listening to your announcement.” I would have smiled and sent her love for a smooth sailing day of her own.

A tip from our workshop is to catch yourself in the act of judging, projecting or taking a superior position toward someone who is “different” and THEN tell someone you trust what you did. The teacher is still very much a student. Thanks for reading my story if you made it this far.

A man opened fire on concert-goers in Las Vegas as if they were soda cans on a country fence,  two days ago. I feel angry, helpless, and deeply sad, if I allow myself to think about it long enough. I condemn violence. We need more love and compassion.

I’m going to be the change I want to see in the world and carry the TSA agent’s face in my mind today as a reminder that SMOOTH SAILING is my wish for every human on the planet.