Noting the usual caveats that nothing is perfect, and all things can be improved, the 25th anniversary of the passage of the landmark American with Disabilities Act is an accomplishment to celebrate. (It’s also been emulated: Since 2000, 181 countries have passed disability civil rights laws inspired by the ADA.) Its origins are truly American: Based in a quest for equality and civil rights, and born of activism. Since it was pre-Internet, let’s revisit one pivotal moment that forced a change in thinking on the need for such a law. (Getting to that moment took decades of work by people with disabilities and their supporters.)
On March 12, 1990, in a dramatic protest that later became known as the Capitol Crawl, (yes, caught on camera) hundreds of adults and children with disabilities gathered at the foot of the Capitol building in Washington D.C., to protest the bill’s slow movement through Congress. As Mother Jones reported: “Dozens left behind their wheelchairs, got down on their hands and knees, and began pulling themselves slowly up the 83 steps toward the building’s west entrance, as if daring the politicians inside to continue ignoring all the barriers they faced.”
The lawmakers could not, in fact, ignore such a protest and passed the bill, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law in July 26, 1990, declaring, “Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”
The law, which now covers an estimated 55 million Americans, prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, state and local government, public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation, and telecommunications. Accommodations we see every day are the result: Wheelchair-accessible public transit, ATMs marked with Braille, widespread use of closed captioning, fire alarms that blink in addition to beeping, and crosswalks that announce when it’s safe to cross, to name just a few.
The area that needs work, most people agree, is with employment. According to the latest government numbers, just 17.1 percent of people with a disability were employed in 2014, compared to 64.6 percent of those without a disability.
Trying to move beyond the “job or no job” statistics, a new survey sought information on not just the obstacles that people with disabilities face, but how often they overcome them. It found that more than two-thirds of American adults with disabilities are “striving to work” and want to be productive members of the workforce, the Associated Press reported in June.
The survey found that of 3,000 people interviewed, fewer than 6 percent had never worked. Just under 43 percents were currently working, 9 percent were looking for work and 17 percent had worked since the onset of their disability.
“It’s a way of describing how active people with disabilities are in the labor market. It’s not just about sitting back and taking benefits,” said Andrew Houtenville, director of research at the University of New Hampshire Institute of Disability, which conducted the survey for the Kessler Foundation.
Such information might help federal investigators weed out those able-bodied people who scam benefits, an area of abuse that needs improvement through enforcement.
A lot of work remains to help those with disabilities find work. But reaching such a goal, step by step, is what we can do, when we keep the big picture in mind.
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