Chuck Grimes wrote:
> The main thrust of what I posted in a hurry this morning, was that if
> you claim to do social 'science' then under that model, you have to
> demonstrate a positive definite statistical change--up, down or
> sideways.
> If it is shown that the number changes were minor or insignificant,
> then the MIT arguement is even weaker, since such a flat curve means,
> ADA was irrelevant. That is, ADA had no significant causal effect
> either way on employment. Sad as that might be, it is still a better
> result than what MIT proposes.
Thanks for this longer explanation. I get your drift and see it is right on point.
I've not been able to download the paper, would still like to see what it says.
> I would also be careful about using any of these sorts of results, by
> trying to turn them to a potentially progressive advantage or view. I
> think it is much better to defeat the work directly with numbers--that
> way it stands refuted. If you can refute it, or demonstrate it to be
> non-productive of any result, then it dies as establishment social
> science wisdom.
Excellent advice.
> Then finally, I know and knew a lot of people who worked for at least
> a decade to get ADA written and passed. I hate the idea all that meant
> nothing. Of course it could have been for nothing. But I still don't
> believe it. For one thing, ADA moved or extended civil rights
> protections into the work place and beyond the public funding
> protections in government, schools, and other public institutions. So
> it remains significant civil rights legislation, even if the
> demonstrable and concrete employment and other economic gains are
> negligible. And obviously, the rationale behind the MIT article has to
> be, that civil rights are find and dandy, as long as they don't cost
> money.
I think that on the ramp, recreation and restaurant fronts the ADA (where activists have been willing to sue) has delivered in the private sector. I am highly critical of the ADA because I am disappointed in the lack of results mainly in the employment arena. It was passed at a time that civil rights were being weakened and as a result it unfortunately was watered down significantly in order to get it passed and signed by Bush. It has no teeth. Bush knew that employment would be our biggest juggernaut and he did everything possible to weaken regulations so that business would not be threatened by it. A recent ABA report found that of all the cases filed so far in courts (employment provisions) that disabled people are loosing consistently. The EEOC has a horrible record on ADA enforcement with tens of thousands of backlogs. It has done virtually nothing for new hires.
What is obvious now is that the ADA alone cannot accomplish its employment goals. (On access the DOJ has filed only two ADA lawsuits in 8 years. The DOJ wins only something like 3 percent of their civil rights prosecution cases while wining 85% of their immigration cases.) But the reasons are not just a weak law and poor enforcement. Pwds do have a different set of issues than women or blacks when it comes to work and some significant blocks were not addressed in the ADA. For example, employers perceive, whether real or not, that hiring a disabled person will cost them more than the standard nondisabled worker. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not but regardless the fact that business exploits labor based on the difference between what it costs to have an employer and the surplus the worker creates makes this an economic issue. The ADA can do nothing to alter this unless the government were to subsidize these costs or mandate employers to hire a certain number of disabled employees. It is inherent in capitalism that business does everything to make a buck and will not spend extra profits on social justice employment decisions.
Another example, the ADA did not address health insurance - insurers can label disabled employees as a risk and jack up premiums, they typically do this for any disabled person an employee or not, so managers look at this as taking away from a company's bottom line.
Then there is the issue of the sheer numbers of disabled people who would like to work provided they could get or take a job - that is about 10 million people who would like to flood the job market. What I have to contribute is this: hopefully by making naked our reality we can move to bigger solutions than civil rights because even if every crip could win a discrimination case in court, every crip would not be able to get a job. For me, the greater solution is full employment at a living wage and that would include breaking the business profit paradigm by federally forcing business to hire disabled people. We don't even have affirmative action right now. One can argue whether affirmative action has brought about the economic parity minorities hoped for but where would women and minorities be today without it?
To me both civil rights and affirmative action have make some inroads, but neither has solved the inequality problem because civil rights do not get to the root of the economic parity question. We have a system that feeds on compulsory unemployment and underemployment. Civil rights cannot create jobs at living wages, it can only aid the individual who is seeking "equal opportunity" in a messed up capitalist economy not deliver social justice to all.
I think Martin Luther King Jr. realized this when he organized his poor peoples encampment on Washington, but was killed before he could expose this nasty side of our economic reality.
Chuck, I appreciated your comments, they were great.
Marta Russell