Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 11, 1990 TAG: 9006110170
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HENRI KISOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
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 might be taken too far.
Suppose an ambitious, veteran, metropolitan-newspaper 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, and frequent schmoozing with politicians. The paper's management realizes the book editor could acquit himself just as creditably as as the other candidate for the job - if a full-time lip-reading and phone interpreter were hired to assist him at $25,000 a year.
Under the act, management cannot deny the deaf editor the job simply because of the cost of accommodating his handicap. There is a clause that allows employers to escape because of "undue hardship." But to invoke the clause might result in a messy and expensive lawsuit. Therefore, the paper reluctantly gives the job to the book editor. From then on, of course, relations between management and employee are subtly strained.
Is my hypothetical example really as extreme as it seems? Maybe not. From time to time, hearing-impaired journalism students ask me if it was difficult 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. In professional journalism that's unlikely to happen, I have told them. Nobody wants to hire two people to do the job of one.
In ordinary practice, "reasonable accommodations" are more likely to be economical and acceptable to all parties, and a farsighted employer can win much good will 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've sometimes thought that on some out-of-town assignments, I could use a lip-reading interpreter. The paper has told me 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.
What's more, the paper has said, it wouldn't need the coercion of a federal law. Of course, it'd be reluctant to approve a proposed out-of-town 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 no qualms about 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 to provide instantaneous "translations" of messages between users of devices for the deaf and hearing users of voice equipment.
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 to reviewers and publishers, and readers will be able to reach me personally as well. I won't need to hope that an editorial assistant is instantly available to handle phone calls for me. 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.
Who will pay for these services? The phone companies, as a normal tax-deductible cost of doing business, and the ultimate bill will be passed on to the consumer. 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.
by CNB