The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law 33 years ago on July 26, 1990, finally offering federal discrimination protections to people with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodations and more.
Yet discrimination against people with disabilities — including in the workplace — persists.
Americans with disabilities continue to face higher unemployment rates than their non-disabled peers, and a recent survey of 3,000 workers from the employment platform Monster found that 17% of workers had experienced discrimination due to their disability, either in the job application process or in the workplace.
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What’s more, employers are still allowed to pay disabled workers sub-minimum wages if the employer receives a special government certificate — resulting in some disabled workers making an average hourly wage of $3.34 between 2017 and 2018, according to a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
A Society for Human Resource Management poll released this week also found nearly half of workers with “invisible” disabilities like ADHD or depression haven’t informed their employer of their condition, in part because they fear colleagues will see them as incapable, scrutinize their behavior, or talk about them behind their backs. Because they’re not disclosing their disabilities, though, those workers aren’t receiving workplace accommodations.
“The ADA has had a profound impact, but we still have much more work to do,” President Joe Biden said in a proclamation Tuesday to commemorate the ADA’s anniversary. “Disabled Americans are still three times less likely to have a job; and when they do, they often earn less for doing the same work. Voting locations, transit, and public spaces are too often inaccessible. And we need to continue building a culture that not only protects disability rights but also celebrates disability pride.”
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Before the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, disabled workers in the private sector had to rely on local policies to fight back against mistreatment, and courts often favored the opinions of employers: A schoolteacher sued New York City in 1965 after he was denied work solely due to his blindness, for example, only for the New York state court to rule the school board was authorized to disqualify him, according to a government report from 2000.
“‘I successfully fought all of these attempted actions of discrimination through immediate, aggressive confrontation or litigation. But this stigma scars for life.’”
Another aspiring New York City teacher, Judy Heumann, said in a 1970 lawsuit that because she used a wheelchair, she couldn’t get her teaching license despite being otherwise qualified, the New York Times reported at the time.
“Before the ADA, no federal law prohibited private-sector discrimination against people with disabilities, absent a federal grant or contract,” Arlene Mayerson wrote in an article on the law’s history for the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, where she has been the directing attorney since 1981. “The job of the disability-rights movement during the ADA legislative process was to demonstrate to Congress and the American people the need for comprehensive civil-rights protections to eradicate fundamental injustice — to demonstrate not only how this injustice harms the individual subjected to it, but also how it harms our society.”
Heumann, who contracted polio as a child and went on to become a prominent international disability-rights activist until her death in March of this year, eventually won her teaching license. But even 18 years after her lawsuit, in 1988, Heumann testified before Congress that she continued to face discrimination regularly while calling for the passage of the ADA.
Speaking about her multiple experiences of discrimination, she said, “at the age of 25, I was told to leave a plane on my return trip to my job here in the U.S. Senate because I was flying without an attendant.”
“In 1981, an attempt was made to forcibly remove me and another disabled friend from an auction house because we were ‘disgusting to look at,’” Heumann continued. “In 1983, a manager at a movie theater attempted to keep my disabled friend and myself out of his theater because we could not transfer out of our wheelchairs. These are only a few examples of discrimination I have faced in my 40-year life. I successfully fought all of these attempted actions of discrimination through immediate, aggressive confrontation or litigation. But this stigma scars for life.”
Decades later, speaking at a virtual Urban Institute event to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the ADA in 2021, Heumann said more still needed to be done to address discrimination against people with disabilities.
“While we’ve made important progress … as everybody knows, we’re not yet where we need to be,” she said.
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