Promise Exceeds Perils of Act for the Disabled

The Americans with Disabilities Act, now being polished by a joint House-Senate committee before being sent to President Bush for signature, promises to be the most important legislative event of the century for 43 million disabled Americans like me, for it extends to us the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The act bars discrimination against the disabled in the workplace and ensures our access to a wide range of services. It’s not without its critics, for nobody has been able to put a price tag on it. Furthermore, its sometimes murky language will make it a bonanza for lawyers. Nonetheless, I’m convinced its benefits will outweigh its flaws--especially for America’s 22 million hearing-impaired citizens.

I’ll confess ambivalent emotions about the act’s provisions against discrimination in employment. It’s obviously desirable that employers be prohibited from denying jobs to the handicapped on the basis of disability alone. But the law also obligates employers to provide “reasonable accommodation” to disabled workers, and that broad language makes me fret that the phrase might be taken too far.

Let me posit an example: At a metropolitan newspaper, an ambitious veteran book editor who is deaf decides he’s bored with desk work and applies for the post of city hall reporter. This job requires hours of telephone work each day, including dictating stories to the rewrite desk as well as frequent schmoozing in the corridors with politicians. The paper’s management realizes that the book editor is just as knowledgeable as the other candidate for the job, and could acquit himself just as creditably--if a full-time lip-reading and phone interpreter were hired to assist him at $25,000 a year.

Both candidates’ talents are equal. But under the provisions of the act, management cannot deny the deaf editor the job simply because of the cost of accommodating his handicap. There is a clause in the act that allows employers to escape because of “undue hardship,” but the paper is a profitable metropolitan daily. To invoke the clause might result in a messy and expensive lawsuit (and gleeful stories in the competition). Therefore the paper reluctantly gives the job to the book editor. From then on, of course, relations between management and employee are subtly strained.

In my more cynical moods I ruminate that such a case might make management less enthusiastic about hiring deaf applicants for entry-level jobs, because of costly potential “reasonable accommodation” demands. Management might hire only a few handicapped employees, just enough to showcase in the front window. Remember what happened to the people the 1964 Civil Rights Act was supposed to empower?

Is my hypothetical example really as extreme as it seems? Maybe not. From time to time I have exchanged correspondence with hearing-impaired journalism students. Invariably they ask if it was difficult for me to persuade my newspaper to hire an interpreter to help me do my job. When I tell them I have had none, they are astonished. They have gone through their entire grammar, high school and college educations with state-financed interpreters in all their classes, and many of them assume that when they go out into the world to work, somebody will hire interpreters to work side by side with them. In professional journalism that’s unlikely to happen, I have told them. Nobody wants to hire two people to do the job of one.

Having unburdened myself of this worst-case scenario, I must concede that in ordinary practice, “reasonable accommodations” are more likely than not to be economical and acceptable to all parties, and a farsighted employer can win much goodwill among the handicapped--in fact, it may even be good for business. For instance, the Chicago Sun-Times voluntarily provides me with the occasional phone help of an editorial assistant as well as a transcript typist a few times a year. The benefit to the paper for the negligible extra expense is a wider range of reliable work from an experienced staffer with a well-known byline.

I have thought that on some out-of-town assignments I could use a lip-reading interpreter. The paper said it would consider as a reasonable expense the hiring of a local lip-reading interpreter for $30 or $35 an hour to help me at a press conference, noisy social gathering or author interview for two or three hours. But my employer would be reluctant to approve an assignment involving the expense of a full-time traveling interpreter for several days--”that would shoot hell out of my editorial budget,” my boss once said. I have no trouble with that; in my case, a full-time interpreter clearly isn’t a reasonable accommodation.

I have absolutely no qualms over the act’s other major provision for the hearing-impaired: mandating telephone services for the deaf that are functionally equivalent to those provided to the hearing. In fact, it gladdens my heart. At the same rates hearing people pay for voice telephone service, the deaf will be able to enjoy not only telecommunications devices for the deaf--keyboard-equipped telephones that look like laptop computers--but also “relay services,” trained third-party operators who serve as go-betweens for deaf users of TDDs and hearing users of voice equipment. These operators will provide instantaneous “translations” of messages between the deaf and the hearing, much like interpreters in the United Nations.

This service will give me a personal and professional communications flexibility I’ve never had. I’ll be able to use the TDD the newspaper already provides me to make my own phone calls. I won’t need to hope that an editorial assistant is instantly available. If I’m alone at home, I’ll be able to call for a pizza, order tickets to the ballet or make medical appointments. That, for me, is the real emancipation of the Americans for Disabilities Act.

(It ought to be mentioned that the act also protects the confidentiality of relayed calls. If, for example, I should want to wager on a horse with a nearby bookie, the go-between operator is enjoined by law from tipping off the cops or the IRS.)

Who will pay for these services? The yearly cost is expected to be between $250 million and $300 million, or about $1.20 per American telephone customer per year--hardly an onerous figure, and one that’s likely to be somewhat offset by a resulting increase in productivity among deaf workers. It’s less an act of charity than an investment that offers the promise of being paid back at least in part--and perhaps in full.