October is Disability Employment Awareness Month. October 15th is traditionally White Cane Safety Day. This is a day that should bring awareness to the importance of the travel ability and needs of all people who are blind. This is important because it has to do with how we get to work and the increasing role that driving plays in doing work.
The unemployment level for people who are blind has remained stagnant for decades. Many people have doubted the veracity of unemployment statistics for people who are blind. I don’t. There are numerous reasons why I think it is true that blind people remain extremely unemployed or underemployed. Here are a few.
Handcrafting work has been replaced with mass production by machine. In fact handcrafting is no longer taught at schools for the blind or anywhere else where blind people attend school.
Blind people attend school with sighted peers and are taught the same academic skills. This means that we expect to enter the same job markets. Use of technology such as scanners, screen readers, and braille displays allows us to perform the same job duties as others in our chosen fields. So something else stands in the way of employment for us. More often than not, several things stand in the way.
One thing standing in the way is transportation. Very few communities offer reliable transportation for people who do not drive. Bus systems are viewed as money-wasters and places where undesirables congregate. Bus routes are not efficient. A person who boards a bus may take over an hour to reach the same destination that a person driving a car can reach within five minutes. A bus system may stop running as early as 6:00 PM, making it impossible for a rider to reach home after work, especially if they also must pick up children from child care centers, shop for groceries, or attend any other appointments or events. If a bus rider has a medical appointment during the day, they must take off half the day simply because of the length of time needed for managing bus routes and transfers. A driver may be able to manage the appointment in one hour. Bus riders struggle not only to get to work but also to get all their other errands done.
If the person has travel duties related to their job, the bus is simply not an efficient means of accomplishing the travel. The person must hire a driver. The driver cannot be paid at the standard mileage rate which employers reimburse. The driver is another person who is working a job and must be properly paid. The pay comes either from the paycheck of the person with the disability, from the employ of a rehabilitation agency, or (most ethically) from the employ of the company which has made a reasonable accommodation to enable the person with a disability to do their job. However, many companies argue that if they must hire two people, they should simply hire the person who is qualified and can drive.
The number of jobs which require some kind of driving is enormous. Casework jobs in which a person works with clients with any form of illness or disability in order to assist them in connecting with community service require the casework to drive clients to appointments. Advocacy jobs in which the employee works with clients on behalf of children who have experienced trauma require the advocate to transport the client to court appointments. No caseworker ever transported me to an appointment in the day when I was a client. In that time, I could have done the job of a casework except for lack of qualifications. Now that I have qualifications, inability to drive prohibits me from doing the job.
Many jobs even require employees to demonstrate ability to drive to work as a qualification. This is neither inclusive nor equitable. In fact, it is illegal. A person with a disability should have numerous ways to get to work which are not the business of the employer. If a sighted driver shows the employer their driver’s license, is the employer also going to inspect their 20-year-old car to be sure that the transportation method is reliable? The answer is no. They simply trust that the driver’s license means the person has reliable transportation and the blind person’s lack of one means they are unreliable.
Exclusivity and lack of equity exists in other areas of the job description as well. Many job descriptions specify physical abilities as requirements as necessary aspects of doing the job. For instance:
Seeing: reading, making eye contact.
One of the most humiliating memories I have is being shouted at by a potential employer: “You have to be able to READ to do this job!” She didn’t want to hear anything about my ability to read. Since I could not read with my eyes, I could not read.
If your company holds this attitude, your company is not inclusive or equitable. You may read visually, but there are other ways to read, especially if you are using a computer. There is simply no other way that I can explain this. Even sighted people use voice output for various reasons at times now. If your job description looks like the above, please fix it.
Regarding making eye contact, I will simply ask if you think you must make eye contact with every phone customer you speak to. If you think that is a silly question, then I will ask you to rethink your eye contact policy. Eye contact is a comfort mechanism that puts people at ease. Blind people who practice good people skills do our very best to use other ways of putting sighted people at ease. Incidentally, eye contact can also be used wrongly to abuse. The ability to make it does not ensure that it will be used well. Please write good job descriptions where the matter of people skills is concerned.
Blind people are not the only people impacted by poor job descriptions where sensory skills are concerned See below:
Hearing/speaking: ability to hear clearly and communicate with clients on the telephone.
Is it really necessary to use ableist language to specify that you need your employ to communicate by phone with clients? Don’t you think your Deaf/hard-of-hearing clients would be honest with you about their ability to do this part of the job? But really, let’s think outside the box. Would you shift your phone work to another employee if you had a superb applicant who could do all the other parts of the job except the phone work? That is called reasonable accommodation. It builds inclusiveness and equity. It allows your company to benefit from all the other things the Deaf/HOH employee brings to the table. What are you shutting your company out from by insisting on physical perfection?
Please think more flexibly and openly in your hiring practices and job descriptions. It will build a better society with much better employment outcomes for everyone, and even better business benefits for your company.
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