Studying the Employment of Persons with Disabilities presented by Peter Blanck, Ph.D., J.D., Lisa Schur, Ph.D., J.D. and Douglas Kruse, Ph.D. June 18, 2003 Sponsored by the Disability Law Resource Project at ILRU RACHEL: Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webcast, studying the employment of persons with disabilities. My name is Rachel Kosoy; I'm with the Disability Law Resource Project, your host for today's event. I will be moderating the webcast or otherwise said I'll be voicing your questions that you E-mail in to the presenters. Shortly, I'm going to introduce you to our three presenters today. We've got Peter Blanck, Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse. First though I want to address a couple of technical issues real quickly. In order to submit a question, you can—if you look at the bottom of your screen that you've got open now, there should be a button there that says submit question. And you can go ahead and click right on that. That's at the bottom of the RealOne Player screen. If you don't see that, you also can send an e-mail to webcast@ilru.org. So you can go ahead and submit your questions now or at any point during the presentation and I will pose your questions as the presenters pause to take questions. Lastly, if anybody is having any technical difficulties today, you can give us a call at (713)-520-0232. Okay, now ready to get into today's webcast. Again the topic is studying the employment of persons with disabilities. This webcast will explore the calibration of the ADA's impact on the employment prospects of qualified persons covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. Today's session is really going to be about how we are or how we may research the impact of the employment provisions of the ADA. And this analysis is really significant for people with disabilities, for researchers and certainly for policymakers among others. Now let me introduce our three presenters. We are very lucky to have three such distinguished presenters today. We've got Peter Blank, Lisa Schur and Douglas Kruse. Now, my introduction about them is going to be a little lengthy because I have to tell you, these three people are very impressive and I've gone through their bios and I had a lot of trouble deleting anything. So let me tell you first about Peter Blanck. He is a professor of law and professor of psychology and of public health at the University of Iowa. He received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard and his law degree from Stanford. He is currently the director of the Law Health Policy and Disability Center at the Iowa College of Law. The center concentrates on public policy and its impact on persons with disabilities with a real emphasis on employment, technology, self-determination and self-sufficiency. Professor Blanck has written over 100 articles and books on the ADA. He has received numerous grants to study disability law and policy. He also has represented clients before the United States Supreme Court in ADA cases, and testified before Congress. He is a former member of the president's committee on employment of people with disabilities. And he's held significant positions with the American Bar Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Association of Mental Retardation. Lisa Schur is our second presenter today. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. She also is a Ph.D. J. D. She received her doctorate in political science from the University of California Berkeley, and her J. D. from Northeastern University. She was an Ed Roberts fellow at the world institutes on disability and her research is very interesting. She focuses on disability, employment and political participation, particularly nonstandard work arrangements among people with disabilities and then the effects of disability and employment on political participation. Okay, Douglas Kruse is equally interesting. He is a professor in the school of management and labor relations at Rutgers University. He is a research associate at the national bureau of economic research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in economics from Harvard University, and let me just tell you briefly about his research. He focuses on the employment and earnings effects of disability and the causes, consequences and implications of employee, ownership and profit sharing. He also has testified before Congress. He's authored two reports to the U.S. Department of Labor, and he's currently working with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to design new disability measures. So I'm sure that gives you guys a really good sense of what a treat we're in for today to learn from the three of them. And I'm now ready to turn it over to you guys. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Thank you, Rachel for those kind introductions. This is Peter Blanck. I'll act as both discussant today and facilitator with our other two excellent panelists, Doug and Lisa. Today's session is very much focused on a threshold issue in the whole national disability policy framework discussion. And that is, of course, who is a person with a disability? As listeners know and as many people know, that definition of disability varies as a function of governmental program, it varies as a function of law, it varies as a function of self-reporting as people with different impairment perhaps perceive themselves less or more disabled and it also varies as a function of facilitators such as assistive technology, information technology that can alleviate a lot of barriers that many people with disabilities face in employment and other situations. Since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, there has been a lot of discussion about who is disabled for purposes of the law. Now, as you know, when the law was passed, the intent I believe was to have a rather broad definition of disability. That is, to allow many people who arguably were persons with disabilities to have access to the courts, have standing, legal standing that is, but that would not necessarily mean that they would automatically prevail on the merits of that case. They would still have to prove they were qualified, they could do the essential functions of the job, and they didn't pose a safety threat and so forth. To date, most of the cases under the ADA, however, have involved this threshold question of who is a person with a disability. And so today, we had hoped to accomplish a couple of things. Number one, for purposes of the ADA, and Lisa Schur can speak to this, talk about who is a person with a disability, and how the courts and in particularly the United States Supreme Court has identified those individuals. Number two, and this is what Professor Kruse, Doug can speak to, is independent of the ADA, how might we measure the impact of the law such as the ADA on persons with disabilities, particularly when we use different definitions of who is disabled, for example, under the ADA, under workers' comp laws, under social security administration laws and programs like SSI and SSDI and any other state or local laws which may be relevant to that determination. So the first segment, I think, and Lisa, if you agree, would be to provide some background, perhaps, on the definition of disability in terms of how the Supreme Court has approached it for purposes of defining a person with a disability. Then perhaps some alternative models of disability and then we can turn to Doug for the second segment on how we might measure disability and the impact of these laws perhaps on the employment of people with disabilities. Lisa. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Okay. The question of how to define disability really gets to the heart of the base of the ADA. The ADA covers people who have a, quote, physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity or have a record of such impairment or are perceived to have such an impairment. And a lot of the cases really get to the question of does this person have a legally recognized disability? So I just want to mention actually one case and then maybe Peter you can talk about some of the other ones. Recently, there was—I believe a 1999 case, Sutton vs. United Airlines, where the question was whether people who use mitigating measures are still considered to have a disability. And that case involved twin sisters who had 20/20 vision when they had contact lenses in, but had substantial visual impairments without their lenses, and they applied for jobs as pilots and they were turned down because their vision in an uncorrected state was not 20/20. And when they sued, the Airline said they don't have a disability because with their contact lenses they see perfectly, and the Supreme Court ruled with the defendant and held that in fact people should be considered with the effects of mitigating measures even though there is a lot of evidence that that's not what Congress intended it to be. But we don't need to get into that. So this case has a very broad effect. It doesn't just affect people who have visual impairments. It affects people who have hearing impairments or use medication to control conditions like epilepsy or emotional disorders or conditions like bipolar disorder, and, you know, many other kinds of conditions and things like perhaps chronic depression. So with basically one stroke of a pen, the Supreme Court just said, okay, the ADA does not protect literally millions of people who can be discriminated against because of their underlying conditions, even though they're perfectly capable of doing the job and the employer is free to look at them when they make hiring decisions in their uncorrected state and look at them in their corrected state when defending against ADA lawsuits. So that's kind of a brief summary of that. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And you may want to say a bit about the Toyota decision as well; how that further narrowed the class of people with disabilities. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, just really briefly. I mean that case dealt with what kind of—again, in order to be considered a person with a disability, you have to have a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity, and that really went to what kind of major life activity does the court look at in determining whether somebody has a disability. And in that case, the plaintiff claimed that she was disabled in doing manual tasks. She worked for Toyota and could do certain tasks, but not other kinds of repetitive motion activities. And the court indicated in that case, the Supreme Court indicated that they didn't even think that a work disability really counts as a disability, but they didn't go that far. They didn't really rule on that, but they did say in looking at manual tasks, it has to be tasks such as taking care of yourself, brushing your teeth, dressing, sweeping, you know, using a broom, whatever, and since the plaintiff had not presented evidence about that, they said, well, sorry, you don't have a disability. You can fill in there, Peter, if you want. PROFESSOR BLANCK: No, no, that's very good. To summarize, we have a situation in which the court has somewhat narrowed or greatly narrowed the definition of disability. Again, who is covered by this law? Who potentially could bring a lawsuit? The question in economic and social science circles and which is really the focus of this presentation, is so if the law has been narrowed or if it's not doing what it was intended to do, what impact is it actually having on the high unemployment rates of persons with disabilities which in fact is what it was intended to help out in the area of, among other things. And so while this legal narrowing was going on, at the same time social scientists have begun to examine the ADA and other laws, governmental incentive programs as sell as disincentive programs and the extent to which that has affected the employment rate of people with disabilities. And Doug Kruse has done some groundbreaking work on trying to identify who is it we are really studying before we can make any strong conclusions about the efficacy of any particular law such as the ADA or otherwise. And Doug maybe you want to give some background on that angle and then once we have these two pieces together we can begin to discuss kind of the state of the art in research and then what's needed from a policy and perhaps advocacy point of view. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Sure. Not surprisingly given the definition—the legal definition of disability under the ADA has been evolving, not surprisingly there is no survey that will exactly capture who is covered under ADA. RACHEL: Doug, this is Rachel. I'm sorry to interrupt, but can you speak a little louder, please PROFESSOR KRUSE: I will try to do so. So not surprisingly there is not any survey that has been—that exactly captures ADA coverage. The two main surveys used to study disability and employment are collected by the federal government. One of them is the current population survey. That's the monthly survey of 50,000 households. And the second survey is called the survey of income and program participation, or SIP, based on 20,000 households. Both of those data sets have a measure of work limitations. And that's kind of interesting it's whether someone reports a health condition that limits the kind or amount of work you can do. The survey of income and program participation also has measures of specific impairments and limitations in activities of daily living and Lisa and I have found that you get different results using different measures. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Doug, take a step back. What led you to do that study in the first place? There were some prior studies I know which you're going to talk about out of M.I.T. and Chicago which perhaps suggested that the ADA was not only not doing its job, but it was what perhaps actually harming the interests of persons with disabilities. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, that's exactly what stimulated us to do these studies, to do our own study, is that there have been these studies out of M.I.T. and Chicago that found a negative effect of the ADA. And they were using that work limitation measure. They were looking at the employment trends of people reporting work limitations relative to everyone else and both of those studies found an apparent decline in employment of people reporting work disabilities following the ADA. And they concluded that the ADA was responsible because of employers being reluctant to hire people with disabilities out of a fear of lawsuits or other concern over high accommodation costs. So they concluded that not only did the ADA not help, but they said it actually hurt employment of people with disabilities. The big problem with these studies is how disability is measured, that work limitation measure. Whether you have a health condition limiting the kind or amount of work you can do. I'll just mention a couple of problems. One basic problem is that when you use that to measure employment status is that limited employment is really part of the definition of work disability because only those who have problems with employment will report a work disability, but also it may not be a good measure of ADA coverage of those who are protected by title I. of the ADA. First, it's under inclusive because it doesn't include people like people with significant disabilities that do not limit work, and quite frankly, I think I'm a good example there. I'm a paraplegic in a wheelchair, and I'm a college professor. I'm doing the exact same job as I did before. This disability makes no difference in the kind of work I do. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Although some people dispute whether some of us professors should get paid for what we do in any event. PROFESSOR KRUSE: True. It may be under inclusive that way, if it does not include limitations in other life activities. But it also can be over inclusive because it does include some people who are not covered by Title I either because their condition does not substantially limit a major life activity, so they're not covered by the ADA at all, or they may not be covered by Title I because they're not qualified for employment. They're not able to work gainfully at all. And there may be changes over time in these groups. So the measure becomes unreliable. For example, and I think this is interesting. Karin Kutchner pointed out that if the ADA is successful in making workplaces more accessible, it may be that some people no longer say they have a work disability. They're no longer limited in their work because the workplace is accessible. They can work just fine. And if they're no longer counted, even though they may have a significant impairment that lowers the estimated employment rate of the people who continue to report work disabilities. So there is a real measurement problem there. Also to the extent that the ADA has been successful in diminishing the stigma attached to disability, people may be more willing to report having a disability, which can add to the problems of measuring employment trends. So it's not a simple matter at all as to how to measure this and I think the work disability measure has a number of potential problems. PROFESSOR BLANCK: That is very interesting, Doug. I assume also that as work places become more accessible or perhaps accommodations become more common place, then people would be less likely to report that they're, quote, disabled as well. And also maybe you can say a word or two about the usefulness of self- report measures in any event about disability and health conditions. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, that's certainly an important issue--the usefulness of the self-report measures. One particular problem is that as I mentioned with the work disability measure that people may be—that some kind of limited employment is almost inherent in the question itself. So it makes it difficult to measure employment status. A particular problem though is that oftentimes even if you use a more objective measure, can you—can you walk, can you see and so forth, people who are employed are less likely to report limitations like that even when the medical records show they have such limitations like that. So there really is kind of a confounding of the measurement of disability with employment status that makes this a particularly difficult area. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What do we—maybe Lisa you can chime in here as well because there are a number of different implications for different work arrangements. So what needs to be done so that policymakers can understand in somewhat of a reliable way whether or not laws like the ADA are in fact helpful to the employment of people with disabilities? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, let me just briefly mention the results of our study. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Yes, please. PROFESSOR KRUSE: When we were addressing what those M.I.T. and Chicago studies said. Actually, why don't I turn that over to Lisa. I've been talking enough. I'll let her describe the results of our study. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, I'll start and Doug you chime in here. We used several different measures of disability in our study. We wanted to get a more complete picture, and we used 14 measures total. We did include that work disability measure, but we also constructed 13 other measures from the survey of income and program participation data set. And in particular, we focused on specific impairments and limitations and activities of daily living. For example, people who report difficulty seeing, hearing, walking, remembering, and so forth. Also we separate out people who say they're able to work from those who say their condition prevents them from working. And we also separated out people who received disability income from those who don't because getting disability income is generally depends on saying that you're unable to work. And there were some disincentives to working if you receive public disability income. So we found different results using the different measures as Doug mentioned. And in particular, while we did find there was a decline in employment among people reporting work disabilities at the time the ADA was implemented, there actually was an increase in employment among people with severe functional or activity limitations who said that they were able to work. And this is basically the group that Title I of the ADA was designed to help. These are people who have substantial impairments. They are substantially limited perhaps in major life activities, but they're still qualified for employment positions. So our conclusion was that there is reason to be very cautious about studies of employment trends among people with disabilities following the ADA and to be very skeptical of claims that the ADA has had a negative effect. PROFESSOR BLANCK: So, Doug, were you going to add to that as well? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, actually, I think she did a pretty good job of that. PROFESSOR BLANCK: So then the next question is, before we take questions from the audience, where do we go from here? What's needed to inform policymakers and advocates and others about the nature of disability in our society and the impact it has on transportation, employment and so forth. And then building off of that, you guys, if for some reason you've got the genius grant award of many millions of dollars that you could do any study you wanted to, how would you study these effects? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, gosh, thinking about all those millions of dollars— PROFESSOR BLANCK: Maybe take the first question. Where do we go from here and what implications do you draw from these conflicting outcomes? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, the implications we draw from the conflicting out comes is that, as Lisa said, there is reason to be cautious of both—of any positive or negative findings about the ADA to date. We don't think there is a strong basis for saying that the ADA has had negative effects. In terms of implications going forward, well, first of all, as researchers we like to have better measures of disability. As Rachel mentioned, I'm working with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and helping to design new questions. One of the—one of the executive orders that President Clinton signed, 13 0 78, set up the task force on employment of adults with disabilities and required the Bureau of Labor Statistics to develop measures to regularly estimate the employment status of people with disabilities because there is not any regular data like that now. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Why is that an important question to answer? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, it's an important question to answer, first of all, if something is not measured, people don't pay much attention to it. But if it is regularly measured and reported on, in monthly reports as the unemployment rate comes out, people will pay a lot more attention to this. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I take it also has an impact on governmental planning and budgeting and compliance efforts, as well? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Exactly. It will have a lot more attention there. What effect this is ultimately going to have is difficult to say. It's going to be difficult to—we can't—even if we develop the ideal measure, it's hard to project that back in time. Impossible to project that back in time to estimate the effects of the ADA, but those measures can be used to estimate the effects of government programs and new policies. And we certainly hope there will be new policies to encourage employment of people with disabilities. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Well can you study the employment rate of people with disabilities in the ADA context independent of other pressures that people with disabilities face, like transportation issues, like governmental incentives to work or health insurance issues? How do you really get at researching the employment rates of persons with disabilities? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, that's exactly the right question. As Lisa said, we tried to take account of the disability income, programs like SSDI and SSI which are very major influences on labor force participation of people with disabilities. So that's absolutely essential to take that into account and as you say, transportation, availability of assistive technology, there are plenty of— there are many things that affect the employment of people with disabilities and all of those need to be studied together. There is no doubt about that. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Rachel, would you like us to take perhaps one or two questions? RACHEL: Sure. You guys are up to it. And I know there are a lot—I know there are a lot of people listening in, so please do go ahead and send in your questions. I got a report of how many people are out there and I don't have questions from a whole bunch of you. Okay, something that came up just to complicate matters a little bit more is this person said that an issue that she's run across is that she believes there is a strong effect on employer attitude about people with disabilities and their ability to participate in work. And she asked how can the ADA be applied to that issue? But I think the question is that something that you also can—that you can measure? Is that being measured? PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a very good question and I might turn to Doug maybe to give a little bit of economics 101 growing out of Gary Becker's work about the self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of disemployment that negative employer attitudes can have. He studied it of course in the context of race and you might talk about it in the context of disability. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah. That's true. There has been a lot of economic work, especially starting with Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winning economist on employer prejudice and how that affects employment rates. Certainly if employers have a distaste for hiring people, they're going to be less likely to do so. He predicted that employers that did that would lose profits and then the other— and their competitors would end up taking advantage of the good people they were missing out on. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Because there was a market for that group? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Because there is a market for that group. But there is another interesting model here. It goes by the technical name of statistical discrimination, which is that maybe just apart from whether employers dislike hiring some groups, maybe the information they have is not very good. Maybe they just think of a person with a disability and think—and have these stereotypes that say, oh, that person is not going to be very productive so I better not hire them or if they are hired already, I better not promote them or whatever. And the problem is that can be very obviously very discouraging to people with disabilities and can lead to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If people aren't promoted, then they're going to be more likely to quit and that can kind of confirm the initial negative stereotype. That's the kind of thing—in fact, this was explicitly mentioned in the ADA that the ADA wants to— is designed to counteract these negative stereotypes and correct that misinformation. If employers actually hire people with disabilities, they'll realize they've been missing out on a good thing, that people with disabilities have a lot of abilities and can help correct some of those negative stereotypes. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Now, on the flip side, Doug and Lisa, I assume that employers as being rational and smart actors, they have to see that there is a huge marketplace out there of persons with disabilities and by hiring people with disabilities, they can capture a segment of that market. Can you tell us a little bit, Lisa, or Doug, perhaps about the nature of the market of people with disabilities? How you would measure that relative to other markets, say, kids markets or whatever, and the relationship that might have with employment? PROFESSOR KRUSE: There hasn't been much research I believe on the consumer markets among people with disabilities. About 20 percent of people have a disability, according to the most expansive measure; actually the 2000 census estimated 50 million people with disabilities. And that can potentially represent a large consumer market, but it's a very disparate market. There is all kind of disabilities and not all of those people would identify themselves as having a disability. So I certainly think that there is a market out there, and some companies who heard about this in a recent conference, some companies have taken advantage of that and appear to be doing well with that, but that's still—it's just very, very new. It's very a nascent type of thing and I don't think there is a lot of good research or numbers on the size of the market and the extent to which people with disabilities are going to respond to marketing efforts targeted to them. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I want to shift gears a little bit, but it's related to Lisa. Maybe, Lisa, you've done some interesting work on alternative work relationships, also union shops and contingent workers and so forth. How do these different work relationships play into this whole discussion of identification of disability as well as employment levels? PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, you know, sometimes when people think of employment among people with disabilities, they think it's an either/or situation. The person can work or they can't work; but it's really not a simple either/or question for a lot of people who have disabilities. A lot can work, but they need flexible or part time schedules since their conditions make it hard to work a regular traditional full-time job. Also a lot of disabilities may be episodic, so you're functioning at one level for most of the time and then your condition can flare up and you can't work for a while. And in fact, what I found in another study is that almost half of workers with disabilities are in contingent or part-time jobs which is twice the rate for workers without disabilities and when I say contingent, that includes temporary jobs, both through temporary agencies and working directly for the employer, as well as people who are independent contractors. I just want to say a couple of things if I may about some of the pluses and minuses of these kinds of jobs. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Please. PROFESSOR SCHUR: On the plus side, they can be very good for employing flexibility. They allow some people with disabilities to work who otherwise couldn't. And they may also be a good way to transition to regular, full-time jobs for some people with disabilities. Just to give an example, temporary jobs allow people to test out different employment arrangements to see what's going to work best for them. But on the minus side, these jobs tend to pay less and they're less likely to have benefits like health insurance and pensions. And not only do these jobs pay less in general, but contingent and part-time workers with disabilities are paid less than contingent and part-time workers who don't have disabilities. And we've estimated it's between 5 to 17 percent less per hour. So there is some real down sides to that. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What do you ascribe that to, Lisa? PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, this gets rather tricky. It's really hard to untangle all this. Some of it may be due to lower productivity, but it appears that employer discrimination is also playing a role here. And in addition, people with disabilities tend to have lower education levels and they tend to be clustered in those lower paying, nontraditional types of jobs. PROFESSOR SCHUR: I think actually Lisa mentioned discrimination and there have been a couple of interesting studies done by Bill Johnson and Marjorie Baldwin looking at measures of attitudes toward people, what are called social distance rankings, how comfortable you are be around someone, and they relate those measures to the wage gaps and find that controlling for education and other productive characteristics, that there is lower pay among people with disabilities that are more stigmatized, which seems to indicate that there is discrimination still going on. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Even within the group of people with disabilities. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Right. So for example, one group who are most stigmatized are people with psychiatric disorders and found that there was a lot of—appeared to be a lot of discrimination against those groups—that group. PROFESSOR KRUSE: The less stigmatized things are for example they had ulcers as one of the least stigmatized. A lot of people have ulcers, and that's not a big deal. Something like epilepsy, even though epileptics can be very productive and assuming they're on the right medication can be just as productive as anyone else. Nonetheless, many people are very uncomfortable around epileptics. There is just this worry about whether an epileptic seizure might come about and that worry, that concern translates into people being very uncomfortable and employers being less likely to hire epileptics. So that's an example of the discrimination basis for some discrimination that can take place. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Shall we take another question, Rachel? RACHEL: Okay. This question is—it's sort of a question and possibly also a suggestion about studies. Could you do a study of people with disabilities as defined by the ADA and ask if the ADA has either helped or harmed them? And they're sort of a tack onto it--will qualitative research help here as well? PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a very good question. Lisa, do you want to start with that? PROFESSOR SCHUR: I think there is a great need for more qualitative research. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Define that for our audience. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, I'm not sure I can do an absolute definitive definition here, but basically things like in depth interviews— PROFESSOR BLANCK: Case studies. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Things like that that just don't rely on big empirical data sets, but you actually sit down with people and talk to them about what have your employment experiences been like? Have you experienced discrimination? What has it been like for you? Those kinds of questions and that kind of research can really get to what people are experiencing. And I think it's very valuable. It sort of can compliment the more quantitative kinds of work. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What about the other part of the question, can we measure through self-report whether or not the ADA has made a difference in a person's life? Can you really measure that? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, actually the Harris polls have done—the Harris company has done a lot of surveys of people with and without disabilities and one of their questions—I don't have it right in front of me—but one of their questions is basically just that question. Has the ADA made a difference in your life and has the difference been good or bad? And overwhelmingly, people with disabilities—at least 90 percent—say, yes, the ADA has been good. That's not focused just on employment. That's focused on all the aspects of the ADA; but also I think it's very important as well to note that people without disabilities have just as positive views. They also say to the tune of 80 or 90 percent that the ADA has had good effects. So I think that's a really interesting question and a valuable thing to do to actually ask people how valuable the ADA has been and there may be some room for doing that with reference to the employment aspects. PROFESSOR BLANCK: How do you think employers would answer that question? PROFESSOR KRUSE: That's a good question. I don't know. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Lisa, you might be able to speak to that. It might vary as a function of employer, small or large perhaps. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true and whether the employer has experience with people with disabilities or not. Rutgers did a recent survey of employers just a few months ago and found that about 25 percent of the employers had hired a person with a disability. This is a broad cross section of employers. And the ones that had hired someone with a disability had more favorable views of people with disabilities and had less—or more favorable views of how easy it was to accommodate them and so forth. So there may be some value to overcoming that statistical discrimination I talked about before that more experience with people with disabilities can lead to more favorable views of hiring them. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Are there other studies, which have looked at less subjective measures like self-report data to try to understand the impact of labor force participation of this group? PROFESSOR KRUSE: That have looked at less— PROFESSOR BLANCK: Most of the data to date relies on self-report, at least as you described it in the census survey. What other ways could you measure it independent of self-reported data? Perhaps economic proxies for studying impact of this particular segment of the labor force or perhaps not including them in the labor force? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, ideally, one would have a complete dossier on someone, a complete medical report to be able to assess all of their abilities and their disabilities. There aren't good data sets like that in the United States. There was a study in Canada where they have the government run health care system where they did have medical reports on people and their disabilities and they certainly found low employment rates among people with severe impairments there as well. I think it would be wonderful to do a study like that in the United States, but I'm just not sure how that—how that can be done with our current system of health care. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Rachel, would you like to throw another question at us? RACHEL: Sure. And actually I just want to throw in a comment there, too, one thing that I hear a lot from employers is that the ADA either has or they're certain it's going to cost them a lot of money, and I think that you're right. You know, the more experience people have with people with disabilities in providing reasonable accommodations, they realize it's not necessarily as expensive as they had imagined, and yet you know for a lot of businesses, it does cost a lot of money. And I think actually, Peter, that's one reason that a webcast you're going to do in the future about tax incentives would be really helpful. Because I think people really don't know about those and don't know that it doesn't have to be as expensive as they anticipate. PROFESSOR BLANCK: So there is something about disability that's different than other diversity initiatives which impact on employers bottom line is what you're saying? RACHEL: Right. Uh-huh. PROFESSOR KRUSE: I think Peter can speak as well as anyone to the question of the cost of accommodations. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Right. Well, it's a complicated question, as you know. You can do simple studies of the direct costs of accommodation, but they're not that enlightening because as the audience knows and you know, often there are many hidden costs and hidden benefits as well that can come out of that which are more difficult to study, like staff time, like co-worker morale, like innovative accommodations that lead to universal design strategies which benefit everybody. My own work has suggested that the net effect is positive, although Rachel as you say, there certainly are direct outlays which might be very hard for a smaller business to swallow. RACHEL: Yeah. PROFESSOR KRUSE: And if I could mention as well, that this Rutgers survey I mentioned earlier of employers found that—they asked employers were the costs of accommodation more or less than what your company anticipated? It turns out that 60 percent said that it was less costly or about what was anticipated. Only 14 percent, that's 14 percent said it was more costly than anticipated. So I think a lot of employers are worried that they may be getting themselves into extremely costly accommodations and that doesn't get born out. A majority of accommodations cost less than $500 and it's very rare for accommodations to cost more than what was anticipated. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What about, Doug, this is a complicated economic question, but you have a good way of making things simple in this regard. PROFESSOR KRUSE: I can make it more complicated, I'm sure. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What about the impact of economic cycles on all of this, macro economic cycles, recession, and all the permutations we've been going through recently? Are persons with disabilities disproportionately affected by the larger economic scheme? PROFESSOR KRUSE: There is some evidence that they are, you know, the concern is they're last hired, first fired, and we did some study of this and there have been a couple of other studies. And they do tend to find that there is some greater—a greater drop in employment among people with disabilities during a recession. And in fact there was a recent study that just came out that in general, apart from recessions, people with disabilities are more likely to be fired than people without disabilities, indicating again possibly some employer discrimination going on there. PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's interesting because you hear a lot of reports that the tenure of persons with disabilities, all else being equal, is generally longer. Job tenure. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah, it varies a lot by type of disability. Yeah, that's something that deserves a lot more research, no doubt. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And is it the case that people with disabilities might be displaced quicker in more difficult economic times because employers perceive them to be more costly or less productive? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yes. That's certainly very possible. That may be part of what's going on when we find the employment of people with disabilities as particularly low during recessions. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And that of course might be a function of a particular segment of the economy as well. So information technology jobs might fare differently than more manual labor type jobs in that regard. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Oh, absolutely. And there is actually an interesting problem that it may be that the reporting of disability varies as well with the business cycle. And that raises, again, more measurement problems that it may be that when the economy is doing well and you're unemployed, you need more of an excuse to explain why you're unemployed so you're more likely to cite the disability. I can tell a number of stories about how this might play out, but then I just wanted to mention that not just the employment levels of people with disabilities, but the reporting of disability very possibly can change over a business cycle. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And the converse would be when jobs are tight, you're very reluctant to be, quote, a squeaky wheel. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Exactly. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Another question, Rachel. RACHEL: Yes. I have an easy one and then a harder one. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, I'll take the easy one. RACHEL: Actually, it's for you, Doug. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Oh, good. RACHEL: Who are the people who participate in the SIP and the other regular government studies and are they the same people each time? PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a very good question. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah, that is a good question. The way the current—the surveys work differently. The current population survey does 50,000 households each month. And they— what they do is they go in and get a household to cooperate one month. And then keep them in for four months. PROFESSOR BLANCK: They call them on the telephone? PROFESSOR KRUSE: I believe there is a site visit the first time, and then the months 2, 3 and 4 they call them back once they've gotten them to cooperate. Then they leave them out for eight months, and then they bring them back in for another four months. But at the end of that time they rotate them out and rotate in a new group to make sure that it's representative. The survey of income and program participation, on the other hand, is much more of what's called a panel study where you follow people over time. What they do is they start a—they contact these 20,000 households and start interviewing them. Then they interview them—re-interview them every four months for between two and three years. So one panel will extend for two or three years. And then each year—well, not every year, but most years they start a new panel of people who are contacted every four months. So the problem with that is that over the course of two or three years, a number of people drop out. People move. They try to follow them up, but sometimes you just can't follow people up and people decide they don't want to participate anymore and that raises complicated issues of how representative the group is at the very end. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I assume they pay people for participation? PROFESSOR KRUSE: They do not with the current population survey. That's a pretty short survey. I'm not sure about the survey of income and program participation. PROFESSOR BLANCK: What about the other survey, Doug, is it the national health interview survey or study? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah, there is a national health interview survey, which I'm not as familiar with. That one—the reason I'm not as familiar with that, that Lisa and I have not worked with that is that it does not have very good employment information; but they have much better and much more detailed disability information. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Is it possible to link people across these surveys? PROFESSOR KRUSE: I don't think so, no. No, and it would be rare in fact for the same household to be interviewed by both surveys because they're all done on a random basis. PROFESSOR BLANCK: So on the basis of these surveys then, the government has all this information, Doug, and what do they do with it? I mean, they make it available to researchers, of course, but how does it impact policy? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, with the current population survey, the first and most basic thing they do with that is they publish the unemployment rate. And the unemployment rate comes out every month and that's a very big influence on public policy. It's an influence on the kinds of monetary policy that the federal reserve is going to implement it's a key indicator of how the economy is doing. So that's very central just to that short-term economic policymaking. But also long term, the current population survey is the basic gauge of the labor market status of all kinds of individuals. It's used to look at everything from how—how the labor market is doing overall to what's going on with blacks, with women, and so forth. It's used for just an uncountable number of studies on how particular groups are doing. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And these data sets are free and available to researchers on a website? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yes. You want me to— PROFESSOR BLANCK: No, we can give that later. Rachel, what was your hard question for Lisa? RACHEL: Actually, you guys gave me a great lead in to it. It's about—it's basically about linking the research to policy. So are policymakers requesting this information? Is this research part of an effort to preserve the ADA? And then lastly, are you interested in responding to Congress' intent about the ADA or even more than that? PROFESSOR SCHUR: I'm sorry Rachel, I had trouble hearing that last part. Could you repeat that? RACHEL: The last part was are you as researchers interested in responding to Congress' intent when passing the ADA, or are you interested in sort of responding beyond that? I think what that means is that earlier in the conversation you were talking about is the ADA doing what it was intended to do? And so by that are you trying to measure, if it is doing exactly what Congress intended it to do or are your interests really broader than that? PROFESSOR BLANCK: Well, that's interesting. Lisa, maybe the issue is to what extent is the ADA a part of a larger national disability policy framework which would go towards the unemployment rate of people with disabilities, but the ADA unto itself is not effective if people can't get to work and don't have transportation, if health insurance is so expensive that you might as well stay on Medicaid or Medicare because, you know, it doesn't pay for you to leave the social security rolls to go to work. Perhaps it goes to the integration of this research to pose those larger questions. PROFESSOR SCHUR: I'm not sure this is directly answering that. I think the ADA is a very important piece of the picture, but it certainly isn't the entire picture. One thing that I think is really critical, if we're interested in improving employment among people with—increasing employment among people with disabilities, clearly we need improved access to health insurance. I think that's absolutely essential. Now disability income recipients have extended Medicare coverage that they can keep it for eight years after gaining employment, but there should be a lot more access for all workers with disabilities. You know, other things that could increase employment would be improving flexibility in jobs, and I'm not just talking about nonstandard jobs, but in traditional full-time jobs as well. Things like job-sharing, flex time, multi- skilling and job rotation, which makes it easier for employers to cope with unexpected absences. This could really benefit a lot of people with disabilities and in addition it would benefit all workers I think such as people who have responsibility for child care or elder care and a lot of different kinds of situations. PROFESSOR BLANCK: The question I have for you and not being too radical, but is always in the back of the mind, can we really talk about Doug and Lisa improving the employment rate of persons with disabilities if we don't talk about health care and welfare reform? Is there a—I guess this comes back full circle, Doug, to what you were saying earlier, and Lisa, who are the people that are most able to go to work who happen to have disabilities but for some environmental or social or attitudinal barrier are precluded from work when they otherwise could work. I guess that's one of the real questions. The other—the flip side to that, again, some people might disagree with this, but are there some people whose disabilities are so severe that they could not work and therefore should not be counted in the unemployment rolls of persons with disabilities. PROFESSOR KRUSE: That's a good question and a good point. I think the quick answer is, yes, we really can't address the employment of people with disabilities without addressing health care and welfare reform or welfare policies and so forth. Yeah, that's quite essential. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And Doug, since we have kind of a captured forum here, I don't want to deviate too much, but from an economic point of view, what would be the impact on this population of national health care of, you know, health care in the European model or the British model provided to all citizens who choose not to perhaps buy private health care or not able to buy private health care? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, I'm not an expert in health care economics, but my quick response is I certainly think it would be very good. And in fact, disability groups were very supportive of President Clinton's efforts for national health insurance back in 1993. That really is a key part of the—of the employment picture. As Lisa mentioned, the 1999 act, the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act did extend Medicare eligibility for people who are disability income recipients who returned to work, extended it to I believe eight years, to try to remove that disincentive of obviously people go back to work and lose their health care, then that's a big disincentive to going back to work. And there is, on the Medicaid side, for people on supplemental security income, there is a Medicaid buy in option that has been experimented with where people are able to—if they're working they can't get health insurance another way, they can buy it at a discounted rate, access to Medicaid. So, yeah, I think that's an essential part of the picture. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I guess the question to you, Doug, not to pick on you as the economist, would be how can we study whether or not the net benefit of having people working and paying a little less in health insurance costs because it's subsidized by the government is more beneficial to our economy than not having them working and paying out more in health care coverage? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well— PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's the 64-dollar questions I guess. PROFESSOR KRUSE: That's what we'd love to be able to answer. One can of course do simple calculations of how much it costs in public expenditures for people who are not working and estimate if X. percent of them were able to be employed, what would the effect be there? The problem is in figuring out that X. percent because there are—it's not a very simple calculation because there are some real—what researchers call selection effects—in terms of the difference—other kinds of differences that people have, the employed and non-employed people have. It may be that it's not easy to shift a lot of these people over and they might still have a lot of extra costs even if they were employed. So it's a complicated research question that deserves a few million dollars in grants and I'll get right to it. RACHEL: Not that this is an advertisement. I'm getting a whole bunch of questions in. Are you guys at a point where you'd like to do more? PROFESSOR BLANCK: Keep them coming. RACHEL: They're pretty varied. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Give us the easy ones first. RACHEL: I'll try. All right, how easily—this actually comes from somebody who is with one of the arc's, how easily are requests for accommodations for cognitive disabilities provided and could you speak to someone in an entry level position? PROFESSOR BLANCK: Lisa, I think you can speak to that as well as I can. Would you like to take that? PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, I think it really depends because obviously there is a huge variety in different kinds of disabilities, but something—you know, some accommodations for example just moving someone's desk so that it's not in a high traffic area or a person needs to have less distraction, those things can be done very, very easily. So I think—I don't know if I can really answer that in a general sense. It really depends on the individual and the employer and that's exactly what the ADA is supposed to do. It's supposed to encourage individualized assessment of the particular person, sitting down with the employer and working out a possible accommodation. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I've had cases involving persons with mental retardation, for example, where the requested accommodation at the entry level was simply to allow a job coach to attend, you know, the early stages of the employment process and even where the job coach, of course was paid for by state dollars or by a provider agency independent of the employer, and believe it or not, some employers are not completely comfortable in that situation because they don't want basically non-employees on their premises. They somehow think they're going to be paying the employee for doing something that the job coach is otherwise doing, but in my own experience, that's been a very effective accommodation, particularly for persons with intellectual, brain injury or other sorts of cognitive impairments and of course at no cost to the employer. A lot of it goes back to attitudes, which is what Lisa was talking about earlier. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Yes. PROFESSOR KRUSE: One part of that question was how often these requests for accommodations are turned down. I'm not aware of any data on that. Are you, Peter? PROFESSOR BLANCK: No, and that's a very good question, because what employer is going to keep track of accommodation that is were turned down unless of course it's the extreme cases where the lawyers will tell them to document it where they don't want to provide it. In my work at Sears for example, we tracked thousands of requests for accommodations at all levels in the organization. Most of them were made informally and most of them were no cost and most of them were worked out at local levels between the local manager and the employee. Yeah, you have a therapy appointment or you have this. Yeah, you can switch your hours from 8 to 5 to 9 to 6 on this day. To me, that's a very effective accommodation. Or you need to have large print on this particular thing, sure, you can have large print. Oftentimes, unfortunately, and Lisa, you might agree or disagree with this, where I've seen accommodations contested, is where there are other sorts of attitudinal issues flying around. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Right. If I could just refer to that Rutgers survey here, there was a question to employers, what is the greatest barrier to people with disabilities finding employment? And the need for special accommodations is 7 percent, and reluctance of employers to hire people with disabilities was 15 percent. So— PROFESSOR BLANCK: And you compound that with your view of attitudes towards persons with cognitive impairments. You're getting up there. By the way, Lisa and Doug, that report you provided on the website, didn't you? PROFESSOR KRUSE: We— let's see, I think we may have provided that on the website. If not, we certainly can do that. It's at Rutgers University on the website there. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I would recommend it to our listeners; it's a very good comprehensive survey that I think was conducted with SHERM, right? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yes, it was. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Society For Human Resource Managers. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Oh, no, actually—I'm sorry, let me take that back. Cornell did it in conjunction with SHERM; they did it with SHERM a few years ago. This one was not done in conjunction with SHERM. It was a separate study. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Right. PROFESSOR KRUSE: I just wanted to mention—actually we've been talking about accommodations. One fourth of these companies said they had hired a person with a disability and among those one fourth they were asked did you have to provide accommodations? And one fourth of them said yes. So three-fourths of the places that hired people with disabilities did not need to provide any accommodations. So it really did get down to a very small segment that needs accommodations at all and among those as we've said, the average accommodation cost is low, almost generally less than 500 dollars. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Probably in the average less than that if you take into account all the work flexibilities that go on on a daily basis. But you had a number of other questions, Rachel? RACHEL: Yes, I do. Okay, this question is—I picked it now because it's a little bit of follow up to the last one. They want to know how you guys feel about sheltered workshops and they tell a little bit about their opinion and it implies that they are not in favor of sheltered workshops and want to know what you think about them and how you think things might change? PROFESSOR BLANCK: Well, I can speak to that if you guys don't mind. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Go right ahead. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I was commissioned last year with some of my colleagues to prepare what I think was one of the largest studies to date tracking almost 10,000 individuals in sheltered workshops across eight states. This paper by the way appears on our website which anybody can pull it down free of charge. And the basic—some of the basic conclusions were mixed and some troubling, some mixed. It's clear that based on our analyses that sheltered workshops provided a vocational opportunity for many individuals who would have a very, very difficult time in working in a competitive employment setting. Having said that, we found that there was a large proportion, I don't have the article in front of me right now, but there was a substantial proportion of individuals who were in sheltered workshops whose skill levels as measured by job skills and ability to do certain tasks were as high or higher than people who transitioned into competitive work, which suggested that there—which suggested that even controlling for skill level, there were many people in sheltered workshops who probably could do just fine working in a competitive employment setting. I could go on about this having written on this a number of times and done a wheel book for the American association of mental retardation on a related topic, but the short answer in my view is sheltered workshops can perform a valuable function, but I think there are other forces at play. There are forces related to parental wishes. There are forces related to pay cycles that come to support certain types of providers and so forth. And I think that— excuse me—the short answer is we as a society need to take a hard look at who is exactly in a sheltered workshop setting, and see if they can be more effectively placed in competitive employment. I say that because there has been litigation recently also over shelter workshops as the caller may know. Sheltered workshops enjoy a tax-exempt status so they don't have to contribute ironically to social security to their employees who are often paid below minimum wage. And the question was whether or not many individuals in sheltered workshops were in fact more like employees than trainees, and therefore, why shouldn't they have their social security contributed to and why shouldn't they be working in the competitive employment setting. Doug or Lisa, would you add to that? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Not at all, and I think that sounds great. PROFESSOR BLANCK: That paper is available on our website and it was commissioned by the presidents committee on employment of adults with disabilities. RACHEL: Great. And I think there are some additional resources like the paper you just mentioned as well as some other links that have been mentioned today. We'll go ahead and put it up on the web page as it's archived so people can find them real easily. PROFESSOR BLANCK: That would be great and thank you for that. We've tried to highlight several articles, which our group, Doug, Lisa and myself have done recently on this webcast site. So those might be of interest to your listeners as well. RACHEL: I have three questions that are somewhat connected. They basically have to do with people with disabilities working in more nontraditional settings. Has there been a study on the efficacy of people with disabilities working out of their homes? The second question has to do with what about people with disabilities wanting to become entrepreneurs? And the third one says that it's her impression that workplace accommodations seem to be showing up in office situations or desk jobs. Are you aware of any studies that look at other work arrangements such as in retail jobs, waiting tables or any other jobs that are not behind a desk? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, let me quickly say something about the home-based work and then turn it to Peter for entrepreneurship. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And then turn it to Lisa for the accommodation question. PROFESSOR KRUSE: People with disabilities are more likely to do home-based worked. I've done some work with Mary Ann Highland of Adelphi University. She was a Ph.D. student at Rutgers and we looked at home based work among people with disabilities and found that this was—this is a little dated now, but the most recent data we had available was 1997. Found that 15 percent, about one out of six, employed people with disabilities did paid work at home and that's compared to about—I believe it was 9 percent of people without disabilities of workers without disabilities. So workers with disabilities are more likely to work at home which makes sense. Especially for those with mobility impairments or special needs for flexibility as Lisa was talking about. In terms of—I believe the question asked about the efficacy of that and the consequences of that, and there just has not been research on that that I know of. Certainly those are valuable options for a lot of people. A lot of people may be able to work at home and not be able to work otherwise. So that opens up some valuable opportunities, but it often involves lower pay as Lisa was talking about with contingent jobs. It involves lower pay and sometimes less job security. But in terms of the consequences in general, I think that's a great question. That's a great research topic. PROFESSOR BLANCK: With regard to the entrepreneurial question and small business question, on our website as well and Rachel will make that available to you, we've done a number of studies, a large empirical study on persons with disabilities as entrepreneurs and as a matter of fact for example in Iowa we've studied the Iowa entrepreneurs with disabilities program. And we've looked at what types of businesses they open. Why did they go into their own employment circumstances and so forth? And we find many of the reasons which we've already talked about, that in fact the flexible scheduling was more—was easier in an entrepreneurial mode, that people had difficulty getting health insurance, that they had experienced stigma and discrimination and interestingly, when you look at the numbers nationally, there is a very high proportion—relatively higher proportion of persons with disabilities who are entrepreneurs as compared to others and that's quite consistent with Doug's findings that people with disabilities are more likely to work at home. As a matter of fact, I think it was about probably two—I'd have to check the numbers—but it was a very high proportion of individuals with disabilities who decided to pursue entrepreneurial options. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Can I jump in there for a second? This raises a legal issue though, and that is that if someone is perceived to be an independent contractor as opposed to an employee, then they're not protected under Title I of the ADA. And that's actually a common issue in some of these lawsuits about whether the person actually is an independent contractor or whether the employer has enough control over their work so that they are considered an employee so they would be covered by the law. So in a sense, if you're too much of an entrepreneur, then you might end up not being protected in certain situations legally. That's not to discourage this, but I just wanted to throw that in there. PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a very good point. Having said that, I'll add another legal twist to that which you know, Lisa, and that is if that person works in a larger setting as a contractor, for example, nevertheless that business setting probably would have to be accessible so that person could work there even if they were an independent contractor, but they wouldn't be covered under Title I, they'd be covered under Title III. PROFESSOR SCHUR: And they have in a number of cases where the courts have said that this person isn't covered under Title I, they can sue under Title III. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Interestingly, Lisa, maybe you know something about this as well, I think contingent workers, say a person who works for man power or something, the man power organization I believe would pay for the cost of accommodations for the contingent worker, but I would assume from an economic point of view they would somehow pass that on, Doug, back to the client in terms of the fee-for-services? Have you found that, Lisa? PROFESSOR SCHUR: Well, legally both the temporary agency and what you call the use employer are legally responsible for making accommodations. It would be wonderful to do a study on how that actually plays out. My sense is that, especially for short-term temporary jobs, that employers might be less willing to make these kinds of accommodations; but I don't really have hard data on that. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Rachel, what have you got next? RACHEL: I got a lot. Let's see, I just want to say to everybody out there. Thank you for sending in all your questions. I'm going to try to get in as many as I can. Any that we don't cover; you will get a response individually afterwards. Okay? All right, here, this one says the unemployment rate of people with disabilities that's frequently cited is 70 percent or more. What's the makeup of the population that was measured? And can you give an estimate of the size of the workforce with disabilities, employed or looking for work? And what do you think is a more realistic range of unemployment for the workforce for people with disabilities? PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a Doug Kruse question but an excellent question. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, let's see, it's often quoted that roughly 70 percent of people with disabilities are not employed. It depends in part on your definition of disability as we've talked about before. Let's see— PROFESSOR BLANCK: How many working age adults are there with disabilities, Doug? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Well, the 2000 census found that ages 21 to 64, that there were about 30 million -- 30.5 million people who responded yes to one of those questions about whether you have some kind of sensory impairment, physical impairment, difficulty going outside the home, and so forth. And that's a very broad definition of disability. And if you look at that broad definition, it turns out that about half of those people, those working age people, are employed. If you get to people who have more severe impairments, people who are not able to walk or see or hear or people who need assistance in doing activities of daily living, then you get to employment rates that are closer to about 25 percent. So, what, if we—I guess just kind of a rough order of magnitude in the general population of people without disabilities, about 75 percent of people are employed. So if we pulled up the employment rate of people with disabilities to that of people without disabilities, that would add—what would that be—that would be another 5 or 6 million people in the workforce I believe. PROFESSOR BLANCK: So basically you took that 30 million-person figure and you cut it in half right away to 15? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Cut it in half—saying that there is 15 million of them employed already, and if we pulled that up and if we took of those remaining, if we pulled that up to the employment rate of people without disabilities, we'd add another—I guess it would be closer to about 7 million, 7 to 8 million people added to the workforce. PROFESSOR BLANCK: And then I guess maybe I'm missing it, but the question is then what proportion does that group make up of the total to figure out the unemployment rate? Is that the way you would figure it out? PROFESSOR KRUSE: I'm sorry, say that— PROFESSOR BLANCK: How do you get to the ultimate question of how many people have disabilities that are so disabling that they can't work? PROFESSOR KRUSE: That's a great question. I mean, as I mentioned with severe disabilities, the employment rate is only about 25 percent, but when we get down to the question of how many people are—have such severe disabilities they can't work, there is only a few—it's a very tiny figure who are actually comatose in bed who cannot work at all. I don't know of any good numbers on the percent that where working is just not feasible, it's not practical at all. PROFESSOR BLANCK: The idea being that for everyone else, however you define that group, if there were changes in governmental policy or accommodations or health care or what have you, then these environmental barriers taken away might greatly enhance the employment rate? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yes. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I don't know if we answered the question but Doug and I had a good conversation. RACHEL: That was great. I see we're clearly not going to get to all these questions. I think what I'm going to do is give you this one that is as much a comment as a question and it might actually help us tie up a little bit in sort of relating this research to the real—the real life that a lot of people with disabilities are facing right now. We got a comment that's from a person with a disability who would like to work, hasn't had luck with the ticket to work. It's clearly another useless program from social security, she says, and you know, her comments are that the information that we're exchanging today is very academic and abstract. So can you guys relate some of this research to people with disabilities, quote, on the ground as to borrow her language, you know, for people who don't have health care and ticket to work isn't working for them. Can you help them make the research relevant to them? PROFESSOR BLANCK: That's a real tough question. I mean that's a great question. This session was meant to be somewhat academic. So we also work, the three of us, in those other grassroots areas. Do you guys want to take a start at that question? In other words, Doug, if you were testifying before Congress, how would you articulate to policymakers that the real folks in the country need to have X. happen? PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yeah. That is a great question. We want to—we certainly want to make this very relevant to the real problems that people are having, and of course it's easy to toss around lots of statistics. And that may seem rather impersonal, but we have to remember there are people behind all of these statistics. I think part of the frustration is that we—we don't have any grand magic bullets. We don't have any grand ideas here. There are certainly a lot of experimental programs going on. She mentioned the ticket to work. That's one of the experiments that may or may not work out at all. And there are some other experiments being done by social security, but we don't have and we're very open to ideas on what would be a good magic bullet here. We certainly have our own ideas about the important variables and things that should be looked at, but we don't have any magic solutions here. PROFESSOR SCHUR: Can I jump in here for a second. I think that settles, also highlights the importance of qualitative research. I mean, it's important to—for so long people without disabilities of been dictating policy, affecting people with disabilities without input from people with disabilities and I think that absolutely has to change. I mean, what's useful is to get together with people who have had let's say problems with the ticket to work program and say, okay, what went wrong? Why hasn't this worked? What do you need? What would be useful to you? And that's where qualitative research is very, very important rather than just relying on these large data sets, these quantitative data sets. RACHEL: Okay. You know, also sort of speaking to this, I can put a link on the archive of this page to some information about participatory action research. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Yes, and you know you're preaching to the choir on that because that's what Rachel, our groups are working on through the so-called CBRC Project which you might want to say a second about, Rachel. RACHEL: No, I don't think I could do it in a second. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Anyway, people can link to that and it's all about making this sort of research relevant to people with disabilities so they can affect change. That's really the bottom line. RACHEL: Right. And actually, it really was the intention in our beginning to offer web casts that we could take so much of the research that's happening out there, and instead of it staying among academics and researchers, really bring it to people with disabilities who can use it and who are reflected in the research, and so we hope that this process actually does help translate some of that material to people with disabilities. So let me just—I'm watching the clock, and we are—we're in a very home stretch here. Let me ask the three of you if there are other things you want to say before I go ahead and close? PROFESSOR BLANCK: Nothing from me. Doug or Lisa? PROFESSOR KRUSE: I don't think so. I think it's been a good conversation. And I'm really glad for that last question about making this relevant to real people because that's ultimately what this is about. We want to make sure that that happens. PROFESSOR BLANCK: I'm sorry. I was going to say something. People who are interested in that should really take a hard look at our website which Rachel will link, which is a NIDRR funded project just on that issue. Just to engage the disability community in articulating and understanding and using this research to the benefit of the community. RACHEL: Ok well, thank you so much, Peter, Doug and Lisa. You guys have really helped us understand the complexity, certainly, of researching and learning about these issues, and I'm sure that many people who are listening today are going to leave this call more determined than ever to promote public policy that can improve the whole web of needs that people with disabilities face. And we certainly do appreciate the work that the three of you are doing towards helping that, promoting that and getting us some of the answers that can help in that process. So thank you very much. PROFESSOR BLANCK: Thank you. PROFESSOR KRUSE: Yes, we appreciate the chance for this dialogue. RACHEL: Terrific. I want to let people know a couple of things in closing. If you guys do have additional questions about the Americans with Disabilities Act and how it applies in Title I or employment settings, as well as other aspects of the ADA, you certainly can call the national ADA hotline, part of that hotline is answered actually here in the ILRU. office. The number is 800-949- 4232. And I want to let you all know that, again, this presentation will be archived. So you can listen to it again. You can read the transcript. You can come back and visit within a day or so the additional links should be up on our website, and finally I'd like to acknowledge NIDRR who funds the Disability Law Resource Project, your host for today and there are a couple of other people I've got to thank as well who make this—have made this possible for us. The ILRU. Webcast team includes Marj Gordon, Sharon Finney, and Dawn Heinsohn. We definitely want to thank Rob Dickehuth, our techie guy who makes this possible to listen to over the Internet, and certainly, last but not least, Marie Bryant who is our real-time captioner who does a great job of keeping up with people who talk as fast as I do. So thanks for joining us today. I hope you'll join us for future web casts and have a great afternoon, everybody.