Many years ago, I was involved with the commercial
packaging industry. I remember going to a huge convention in
Chicago where there were dazzling displays of all the latest
models of packaging equipment from around the world. I was
impressed! At one point, grabbing a cup of coffee, I struck
up a conversation with another attendee. When I
enthusiastically commented “Isn’t this a great show?!” he
reflectively responded; “Well, they are putting fancy bells
and whistles on the machines, but there hasn’t been a
revolutionary breakthrough in the industry for over a
decade.”
With that experience behind me, I keep wondering… where
is the revolutionary breakthrough that we need to see real
gains in the representation of people with disabilities in
our workplaces? While we have continued to refine our job
placement strategies, programs and policies, what we really
need is a revolutionary breakthrough of some kind. Yes, we
are making some progress, but “business is usual” is getting
us nowhere fast.
The last real breakthrough that I remember was thirty
years ago when the idea of “Normalization” or “Social Role
Valorization” revolutionized the lives of folks with
developmental disabilities – calling segregated employment
into question and pointing the way to real work in their
communities. In concert with the then-new strategy of
“Supported Employment”, some real gains were made for that
particular group of people with disabilities. Fifteen years
ago, a lot of us had hoped that legislation, particularly
the employment provisions of the Americans with Disabilities
Act, would be the breakthrough we hoped for. Sadly, research
indicates that the ADA has not been responsible for any
appreciable progress in workforce participation rates for
folks with disabilities. Similarly, Canada’s Employment
Equity Act has had only minor impact on the overall
unemployment experience of people with disabilities. More
recently, many of us had our hopes set on the U.S.’s Ticket
to Work program - a seemingly major breakthrough in public
policy that would eliminate many of the financial
disincentives that hinder people with disabilities from
leaving the social security system to return to work. So
far, it too has proven to be a cloud without much rain.
I am beginning to believe that any real progress that we
are going to make on the forefront of workforce
participation for people with disabilities is not going to
come about without a dramatic rethinking of the entire
concept of “disability”. I think we need a breakthrough in
conceptualizing disability more than we need a breakthrough
in employment policies, practices, resources or strategies.
In the past century, we have made remarkable strides in
shifting away from a predominant view of people with
disabilities as a special group of folks who need “fixing”
and who, until they are fixed, need to be precluded from
work. We have shifted towards a more progressive view of
them as a special group of folks who have latent or residual
talents that, with some tinkering, can allow them to be
productive in the workplace. That has been a progressive
step, but I don’t think it is enough.
Where do we need to go with our understanding of
disability? What is our next great conceptual hurdle? I
think it is this: that people with disabilities are “us” -
that “we” are “them”. I believe that, as a society, have
been fooling ourselves… socialized into thinking about
disability as unnatural, peculiar and atypical within the
spectrum of human experience. We have been misled into
thinking there is an “us” and “them” – that there is
actually a distinct, defined or recognizable group of human
beings who are not like “us”… the “disabled”. If that were
true, shouldn’t we have been able to come up with a clear or
precise definition of “disability”?
Not so strangely, we continue to have great difficulty
determining what the cut-off point is between disabled and
non-disabled. (Maybe because it doesn’t really exist?). If
someone asks the question “What is the definition of
disability?” the best answer is probably the question “For
what purpose?” There is no universal definition of
disability. (This is what makes comparative research so
difficult – comparing disability statistics is often like
comparing apples to oranges.) In 2003, the US Interagency
Committee on Disability Research identified 67 related but
separate definitions of disability in the United States Code
(codification system for all general and permanent laws).
Different governments and organizations throughout the world
have their own working definitions. Their lack of consensus
or consistency is a pretty good indicator that the
determination of disability is somewhat subjective.
Disability, differences and limitations are not simply
characteristics of a definable subset of the human race.
Rather, they are qualities that weave in and out of our
individual lives and permeate the whole of what we call the
human experience.
Deborah Kaplan, Director of the World Institute on
Disability, has proposed that we should adopt a “Disability
Model” that “regards disability as a normal aspect of life,
not as a deviance and rejects the notion that persons with
disabilities are in some inherent way ‘defective’.” Deborah
asserts that “The disability rights movement is working
towards a society in which physical and mental differences
among people are accepted as normal and expected, not
abnormal or unusual. We have plenty of methods and tools at
our disposal to accommodate human differences should we
choose to. Ironically, the growth of technology in our lives
provides us with both the ability to detect more human
differences than ever before, as well as the ability to make
those differences less meaningful in practical terms. How we
react to human differences is a social and a policy choice.
We prefer to advocate for a social structure that focuses on
including all people in the social fabric, rather than
drawing an artificial line that separates ‘disabled people’
from others.” I am drawn to her proposal.
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a refreshing little
website called “Disability is Natural”. It is primarily
focused on the life experience of children with
disabilities, but the “disability is natural” message that
it promotes is worthy of a much broader audience. Here is an
important question posed on this website: “One of every five
Americans is a person with a disability. Some people are
born with conditions we label as disabilities; others may
acquire a disability through an accident or illness; and, if
we live long enough, many of us will acquire a disability
through the aging process. Disability does not discriminate!
People with disabilities make up the largest "minority
group" in the United States, and it's the most inclusive! It
includes individuals of all ages, both genders, and any
sexual orientation, as well as people from all
socioeconomic, religious, and ethnic groups. How can
disability not be natural?”
In concert with this thinking, buried in Section 508 of
the United States Rehabilitation Act and several other U.S.
Acts, is the profound, revolutionary and
seemingly-overlooked statement that “disability is a natural
part of the human experience.”
I think it is time that we begin to re-envision the
economic and workplace participation of people with
disabilities from that perspective. I believe that if we
develop a broad cultural understanding of disability as a
normal and integral part of the human experience (and not as
a deviation from it), it will entirely revolutionize our
workplaces. I believe that this re-envisioning will compel
our workplaces to be proactively inclusive of people with
disabilities. With this understanding, companies will
expect, as a normal course of events, that a good portion of
their workers will come with physical and mental differences
and that others will likely acquire them. They will focus on
finding ways to maximize the productivity of these
individuals – not on ways to exclude them.
If this were to take place, people with “invisible”
disabilities (e.g. minor hearing loss, a mental health
issue, failing health, etc.) who now struggle to “pass” in
our workplaces - to keep their disabilities hidden from the
jaundiced eyes of their co-workers and/or bosses, could
focus on their jobs and openly work with their employers to
explore ways to heighten their productivity. Similarly,
people with obvious disabilities (e.g. wheelchair users,
folks with Downs Syndrome, etc.) who now have to “prove”
themselves daily in workplaces where their abilities are
held “suspect”, could, with their employer’s confidence and
collaboration, simply focus on doing their jobs well.
Taking this one step further, I believe that these new
workplaces would be better and healthier for everyone. In
the context of diversity in general, and disability
specifically, I have long-asserted that most North American
workplaces are impoverished because they deny employment to
people who have been subjectively defined as “different” –
folks whose conditions and life experiences, while not
falling within the statistical “norm”, are incredibly
vibrant, poignant and important dimensions of the human
experience.
Remember that, for most of us, over forty percent of our
adult waking lives are spent in our workplaces. By their
exclusionary hiring practices, our employers serve up very
shallow and bland portions of life experience for us. We
ourselves are impoverished because our employers’ hiring
practices deny us the wealth of human experience that comes
from regular interaction and relationships with people whose
life experiences are dramatically different from our own.
There is a mysterious phenomenon that is frequently
reported by employers in conjunction with the hiring of
someone with a significant disability – that there is a
perceptible, but indefinable qualitative improvement in the
workplace. My hypothesis is that this phenomenon is directly
linked to how a workplace responds when it enriches itself
with people from a broader range of human experience – that
it gives us, as coworkers and supervisors, the opportunity
to become more “human” – to become wiser, healthier, and
more understanding of ourselves and others.
We have recently added a book to our online store
entitled “ABLE: How one company’s disabled workforce became
the key to extraordinary success.” It is a rare little book
– rare because, in a way that has seldom been done before,
it puts its finger on the pulse of that qualitative change
in the workplace - rare because it readily mixes words like
“love”, “caring” and “courage” with “productivity”,
“competitive”, “work ethic” and “revenues”. In a company
where they are in the minority, employees without
disabilities report that “thanks to their disabled
co-workers… they‘ve become better people, more caring and
compassionate, and more adept at handling life’s punches.
They are also quick to point out that the real disabilities
aren’t found in the imperfect bodies of the ‘distracted’
workers, but in the hearts of the so-called ‘normal”
employees, including themselves.”
Taking on the task of causing our society to undertake
such a re-envisioning is an enormous task but it comes with
the promise of an even more enormous payback.
