Universal Design Could Get People Working, by Deborah Kaplan

Universal Design Could Get People Working

By Deborah Kaplan

This article is republished with permission of both the author and DisabilityWorld.com, where it was first published.

Debby Kaplan, Executive Director of the World Institute on Disability, wrote the following article which then appeared in an edited form as an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times.

We in the disability movement have a grand concept known as "universal design." It postulates that if a building, appliance, service or just about anything else in civilization is designed with all users in mind, including the 50 million Americans with disabilities, everyone benefits. A wheelchair access ramp is used more often by pedestrians than wheelchairs; speakerphones were designed for the disabled but are universal today; close-captioned TV ostensibly for the hearing impaired wound up in every sports bar in America.

There are many such examples, and they all eliminate false distinctions between people with disabilities and the other four-fifths of the population, seeing the aggregate as one big "market" for a smart product or service. Ventures which ignore 20% of a potential market are apt to fail, but ideas adaptable to the widest possible markets are apt to succeed and innovate.

The economy is slouching toward a possible double-dip recession, with flat growth and rising unemployment, now at 6%. A Social Security crisis looms as our aging demographics shrink the labor force. What better time to rethink our workforce, and apply the lessons of universal design? The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act envisioned a workforce in which people with disabilities were fully integrated into the whole. But today, only about a third of working-age people with disabilities work, as opposed to the eight out of 10 of them who say they want jobs. Despite the ADA's promising principles, the employment rate for people with disabilities remains unchanged since 1990. Thus millions of willing and able workers are sidelined, supported at an annual cost of $232 billion in direct payments plus $195 billion in lost earnings and taxes. The failure of the ADA to produce higher employment rates for people with disabilities is due in part to how it has been applied. The Supreme Court has systematically narrowed the ADA's scope by siding against people with disabilities in all six ADA employment cases it heard. It announced it will hear a seventh which could end up shielding states from ADA lawsuits entirely.

But beyond legal hurdles is the greater obstacle of a mentality that needlessly segments and categorizes the population as disabled vs. not disabled -- those defined in the presumptive workforce vs. those defined out. A universal design approach to the problem would survey the entire pool of potential workers, and ask what innovations could encourage inclusion for all. Today, tens of millions who would work given the opportunity are jobless -- not only people with disabilities, but 10.2% of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Americans over 55, and millions of others not officially counted as unemployed. One measure under consideration in Washington that could help accommodate them in a more univerally designed workforce is payroll tax relief.

Payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare benefits, are already universal in the bad sense of the word: they are the biggest taxes eight out of ten Americans pay, accounting for more than one-third of ALL federal revenue. But they are job-killers; they make employers and workers pay an additional 15% on salary and benefits, inflating hiring costs and depressing job growth while squeezing paychecks.

Payroll tax cuts or rebates could create new jobs, reduce the regressivity of other proposed tax cuts and put more money in the pockets of low- and middle-income workers whose discretionary spending drives economic recovery. Of course, federal taxes would need to be collected from other sources of revenue. If payroll tax disincentives were removed from hiring, the job market would afford new job opportunities for millions -- people with disabilities along with everyone else. Not only would disability employment rates, economic empowerment and benefits funding increase, but so would the entire tax base, rescuing Social Security and Medicare funding for everyone, and reducing government dependency costs arising from joblessness.

Remember the access ramp, the speakerphone, and close-captioned TV? If those small-scale innovations improved your life at all, think how much more benefit the whole economy would derive from a universally designed workforce that embraced tens of millions of new workers who no longer were left on the outside looking in.

Deborah Kaplan is the executive director of the World Institute on Disability in Oakland and an advisory council member of Get America Working!