He was
speaking at the American Legion convention, but the news resonates for all
disabled Americans, not just the veterans he was addressing.
The
specific target of 7 percent will give teeth to what has been a vague
affirmative-action goal since President Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act of
1973. It follows upon President Obama's earlier
promise to make the federal government itself a model of equal opportunity
employment. But this additional step is
particularly meaningful because it fulfills a 40-year-old bipartisan promise
to, as Biden said, "help ensure equal rights and employment opportunities
for veterans and people with disabilities."
I was
not yet 10 when the Rehab Act became law, but I was already a
wheelchair-user. I was born with a
neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy, which rendered me
quadriplegic. The Rehab Act was the
first far-reaching piece of legislation defending the rights of folks like me. It took four more years, and nationwide protests
and sit-ins, for one of its most important provisions—Section 504, which
requires equal access for the handicapped in federally funded institutions and
programs—to become codified. As a
result, I was able to attend almost any college I wanted. At least in theory. The law went into effect in 1980, the very
year I graduated from high school.
Of
course, that transition wasn't easy and this one won't be either. At the time, some universities were frank
about the challenges of accommodating a student in a wheelchair. "It'll be damn difficult," one
admissions officer told my father.
Others bent over backwards to avert a lawsuit, even accepting me before
I had actually filed an application.
I ended
up at Harvard, one of its first—if not the
first—quadriplegic freshmen admitted.
After
all these years I assumed that the Rehab Act had done its job. It had gotten stuffy old places like Harvard
to accommodate students like me. I did
not know about federal contractors, about Section 503.
Some
might say that in clarifying and enforcing Section 503, which merely required
federal contractors to "develop and implement a written affirmative action
program," the Obama Administration is fixing a problem that didn't exist. To me, though, it's more accurate to say the
president went out of his way to bring people with disabilities into parity
with other minorities and women.
Indeed,
the issue was barely on disability-rights activists' back burners. A hotter concern has been the UN's Convention
on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to safeguard disability rights
internationally. Or how to stop Medicaid
from shunting recipients into expensive, neglectful nursing homes instead of
allowing them home-based, self-directed care--a cause the president seems to
favor, in his support of the Olmstead ruling.
But
employment disparities should not be overlooked. In June, the U.S. Department of Labor
estimated that unemployment among employment-age people with disabilities was
14.2 percent, almost twice the 7.6 percent for the rest of the population.
Granted,
some disabled people may be easier to employ than others. In fact, an earlier Labor Department proposal
for enforcing Section 503 called for a lower threshold of just 2 percent for
the most severely disabled. But we have
to face the fact that there is still unwarranted prejudice. Even with my Harvard degree, I never could
find a job. Instead, I took freelance
writing assignments. Voice-recognition
computers certainly upped my productivity.
I'm using it to write this.
So it might
take a little creative thinking, flexibility and technology to meet these employment
goals. Is flex-time an option? Can some of the work be performed at
home? People who live with disabilities
tend to be expert problem-solvers and self-starters.
My hope is
that the new standard will help people with disabilities take control of their
own lives and reduce their dependence on government subsidies. More than that,
I hope it will help show the nondisabled coworkers what we're made of. After all, the point of diversity and full
inclusion is not just to benefit the marginalized. It is to create the kind of synergies that
can only come from expanding one's boundaries, from welcoming the new and
different, and allowing the cross-fertilization of ideas.
It's
unfortunate this important piece of civil-rights progress was overshadowed by
the following day's tributes to the 50th anniversary of the March on
Washington. It's surely something Martin
Luther King would have supported.
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