July is Disability Pride Month, and this year we celebrate the 36th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).
Today, people with disabilities are unemployed at more than twice the rate of people with no disability—8.9 percent compared to 4.1 percent. It should be our goal to eliminate that discrepancy. Until we do, ensuring that the unemployment system is functional and accessible for everyone is twice as important.
Like all people who are unemployed, people with disabilities who are unemployed want to work and are actively seeking a job. They need access to good, stable jobs that allow them to support themselves and their families. And while they are out of work, they need unemployment benefits.
Unemployment Insurance (UI) is a critical tool to help people through the often frustrating and increasingly challenging time between losing work involuntarily and finding a good replacement job. However, administrative policies and practices can create unnecessary hurdles for people filing claims and make the system inaccessible. Likewise, when policies defining who can be eligible for UI are too restrictive, the unemployment system fails to live up to the letter and spirit of both UI and the ADA.
Making UI accessible for people with disabilities makes it better for everyone. In the disability community, the “curb cut effect” is often used to describe how accessibility doesn’t only help people with a specific disability: In this case, curb cuts don’t just help people in wheelchairs; they also help people with strollers, or luggage, or delivery carts.
All the suggestions presented here will make the UI system more efficient for everyone. This blog is intended to highlight some key areas and core ideas to elevate this issue. For those interested, there’s a much more detailed analysis available.
The guiding principle should always be “nothing about us without us.” The most important part of making UI accessible is continuous communication with people throughout the disability community and making sure their feedback and insights help guide policy making.
The Basics of UI Accessibility
The first hurdle to accessibility is getting in the front door. For UI applicants, that can be physical or digital—or both. During the application process, well-written well-designed forms are crucial. All agency communications should aim to not merely conform to federal standards; they should be thoroughly user-tested with a variety of claimants and a variety of disabilities. Agencies should have dedicated staff to work with people with disabilities, ensuring their questions and concerns are addressed in a timely manner.
Recommendations for technology upgrades should be examined through a disability lens. For example, setting time outs during an online session should only be done if claimants are given ample audio and visual warning. Password resets should always be simple and secure. Claimants should be able to receive new passwords without calling the agency (which too often means long wait times) or waiting to receive something in the mail.
Online claimants should be able to go back to an earlier page if they think they might have made a mistake. Forms should include pop-up explanations of terms and reasons for each question. Technology should be optimized for mobile and screen readers and generally available 24/7.
Moving past administration, UI policy itself needs work. Most aspects of the comprehensive UI reform legislation that NELP supports are important for people with disabilities in particular, but for the purposes of this short commentary, two key areas to highlight are ensuring that people only seeking part-time work can access benefits and extending duration of benefits. People with disabilities may require part-time work as an accommodation, and duration of benefits is always going to be critical for a population with twice the unemployment rate of the general population.
The Social Security Act requires that claimants “must be able to work, available to work, and actively seeking work.” The shorthand for this “able and available” can be interpreted to refer more broadly to any disability. What this term actually means is that a claimant could accept a job on the week they received a benefit. Some states now simply ask claimants if they would accept a job offer and leave out the “able and available” jargon, which makes things clearer. Juris Doctor Rachael Kohl has written extensively on this matter and why the term conflicts with the ADA.
The best way to honor Disability Pride Month and the anniversary of the ADA is to center disability rights in every area of public policy. In the case of unemployment insurance, where people with disabilities are more than twice as likely to experience unemployment, we should be doubly concerned about disability rights. Building a better, more inclusive unemployment system improves all our lives.
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