Pay for those with disabilities

When I became blind 50 years ago, I learned the term “sheltered workshop,” a workplace designed to provide a safe environment for disabled people. Many rehab agencies housed such a facility on their premises. I grew most familiar with one offered by the former Pittsburgh Blind Association which made and sold brooms. Today, through the Blindness and Visual Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh, anyone can still buy brooms produced by workers with visual impairments.

Sheltered workshops developed in the U.S. during the late 1800s. At first, schools to educate blind children appeared—1829: Boston, 1831: New York City, and 1832: Philadelphia. Most of these schools focused on educating blind and visually impaired youths for paid work. Students were taught chair caning, basket-weaving, rug-weaving, and other skills in hopes that they’d be self-supporting as adults. But few of these graduates became financially independent.

As a result, sheltered workshops developed to employ them. After WWI, the government   tried to rehabilitate returning veterans whose injuries resulted in various physical handicaps. However, blind people were excluded; the government deemed them unemployable.

But in 1935, Congress extended its help to blind people, employing them to run vending stands on government property. These venders offered mostly sugary beverages, candy, chips, and baked goods, though a few sold a small percentage of fruit, vegetables, and nuts. In 1943, this law was strengthened to accommodate WWII blinded vets. In 1973, Congress enacted Title V of the Rehabilitation Act, giving the disabled protection against bias. The 19990 Americans with Disabilities Act seemed to free people with physical impairments from past prejudice for good.

But not so. Workers with disability still face discrimination financially.  Today, they lawfully can earn less than half the federal minimum wage, $3.34 an hour. As of April 5, 2021, there is still no wage floor in sheltered workshops. Employees can, and often do, earn under $1 a day! Frankly, these are prison wages, which are themselves disgraceful. Result: people with disabilities often experience the highest rate of poverty.

This was addressed in the failed “Build Back Better” bill which would have require that those with disabilities be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour like their able-bodied counterparts. Please urge your state legislators and those in the U.S. Senate and House  to pass this important legislation and provide long overdue financial equality to all citizens.

The Unseen Minority Part II

Regarding job barriers for the blind in the local Pittsburgh area, I hear often from groups and individuals with visual impairment that feel “unseen.” Healthcare and pharmacy retail companies, cable corporations, and large health networks in Pittsburgh employ very few blind people. Instead, I’m told that these corporations hold an annual dinner to honor a stellar visually impaired employee. Though the National Federation of the Blind and others have filed suits in other states against Epic Systems, the electronic medical record provider here in Pittsburgh, our health networks have ignored requests for more accessible technology by numerous groups and individuals. The corporate officials claim the accommodation would cause undue financial hardship. If companies made such computer changes, additional blind people could work not only in the clinical and administrative sides, but in their call centers, as well.

The Unseen Minority

To many blind people and those who work with the visually impaired, Frances Koestler’s 1976 book, The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States is sacrosanct. In the beginning of her history, Koestler characterizes the blind as unseen, ignored, sent away, even killed. Though enormous progress has been made today in the lives of those of us who are blind, I often feel that we are still unseen, at least overlooked or not attended to.

Koestler describes the early history of the blind:

They were feared, shunned, pitied, ignored. Some were thought to be blessed with magical powers, others to be accursed for their sins…Some were killed as infants. Others were tolerated in youth, then abandoned to die by the roadside or even buried alive when they grew old and infirm…They were White, Black, Brown, Yellow, Red. They were of every race and every faith, of every class…”

Today, we live in a world where advances in education and training allow the blind to work in law, education, health care, social work, rehabilitation, technology, occupational, physical, and chiropractic therapy, customer service, vending stand operation, music, publishing, etc. The ADA requires accommodations. Yet, our needs are still “unseen.”

Arielle Silverman, PhD, director of research at the American Foundation for the Blind, has just released a new report on barriers to physical inclusion. Its findings reveal that both people with disabilities and businesses suffer from inaccessible websites and apps. Conducted in late 2022, the survey captures the difficulties of 398 blind, low vision, and deafblind participants: 90% encounter at least some website problems when applying for jobs; 88% when ordering food; 86% when shopping online, plus more than 90% when booking air, train, or bus travel. The numbers are similar when using apps. Overall, 21% say they deal with web access barriers at least once a day while 28% face an inaccessible app at least once daily. This, despite the A.D.A.’s passage to end discrimination.

And interestingly, burdens on blind customers translate to losses for businesses. 44% of blind website users and 41% of app users say they will switch to a different business if they can’t overcome the challenges. Here in Pittsburgh, blind workers face many barriers. This will be the topic for my next post.

Electric Scooters

For the past six months, as I walked my guide dog along Forbes Avenue, a main Pittsburgh thoroughfare, I heard the talk, laughter, even singing of people gliding past in the middle of the busy street. My guide, Dave, turned to watch as the people passed.

“What’s going on?” I wondered. The passersby didn’t sound enclosed. No bicycle swishing pedals, spinning wheels; certainly, no rumbling skateboards or roaring, backfiring motorcycles. Finally, I put it together—that very new technology—electric scooters. I’d read about them, the hottest recreational item in the city.

“What fun!” I thought, remembering how, before I was blind, I’d ridden people-powered scooters as a kid through my rural Pennsylvania town. How I wished now that Dave could guide me while I swooped down Forbes on one of them! But alas. Not possible. Still, how good for the environment! Yay for Pittsburgh!

But recently, I’ve discovered a big down side to the scooters, at least for me and others with disabilities. People who have ridden them Park the scooters upright in the middle of the sidewalk or toss them unceremoniously to the concrete. This creates barriers for those of us who cannot see or cannot walk.

During Thanksgiving weekend, I encountered a group of unoccupied scooters near the corner of Forbes and Wightman Avenues. My dog stopped abruptly, and I thought he was illegally sniffing. Fortunately, before scolding him, I felt the handle of a scooter a few inches from my face.

I turned right to “scoot” around and found three of them, side by side. But to go around them, I would have had to step into the whipping traffic of Wightman Avenue.

I turned left and asked Dave to move left, then forward. He stopped. A resident’s concrete wall was too close to a scooter to give us enough space.

Finally, I dropped Dave’s harness and walked ahead of him, squeezing between the wall and offending scooter. This was a risk—walking forward without my dog. A gaping hole or other hazard could have been present.

Back home, my adult children told me they’d driven past another Squirrel Hill intersection with several scooters strewn over a curb cut. No person in a wheelchair could have crossed that street.

So, no animosity necessary. Scooter riders and disabled people can occupy common places in harmony. Parking requirements could easily be arranged to accommodate both scooter enthusiasts and those of us with disabilities. Please consider calling your city council representative to address this problem.

Pay for those with disabilities

When I became blind 50 years ago, I learned the term “sheltered workshop,” a workplace designed to provide a safe environment for disabled people. Many rehab agencies housed such a facility on their premises. I grew most familiar with one offered by the former Pittsburgh Blind Association which made and sold brooms. Today, through the Blindness and Visual Rehabilitation Services of Pittsburgh, anyone can still buy brooms produced by workers with visual impairments.

Sheltered workshops developed in the U.S. during the late 1800s. At first, schools to educate blind children appeared—1829: Boston, 1831: New York City, and 1832: Philadelphia. Most of these schools focused on educating blind and visually impaired youths for paid work. Students were taught chair caning, basket-weaving, rug-weaving, and other skills in hopes that they’d be self-supporting as adults. But few of these graduates became financially independent.

As a result, sheltered workshops developed to employ them. After WWI, the government   tried to rehabilitate returning veterans whose injuries resulted in various physical handicaps. However, blind people were excluded; the government deemed them unemployable.

But in 1935, Congress extended its help to blind people, employing them to run vending stands on government property. These venders offered mostly sugary beverages, candy, chips, and baked goods, though a few sold a small percentage of fruit, vegetables, and nuts. In 1943, this law was strengthened to accommodate WWII blinded vets. In 1973, Congress enacted Title V of the Rehabilitation Act, giving the disabled protection against bias. The 19990 Americans with Disabilities Act seemed to free people with physical impairments from past prejudice for good.

But not so. Workers with disability still face discrimination financially.  Today, they lawfully can earn less than half the federal minimum wage, $3.34 an hour. As of April 5, 2021, there is still no wage floor in sheltered workshops. Employees can, and often do, earn under $1 a day! Frankly, these are prison wages, which are themselves disgraceful. Result: people with disabilities often experience the highest rate of poverty.

Fortunately, the House of Representatives just passed, and the Senate is facing a bill that includes a remedy to this outrageous, near-200-year inequity. The “Build Back Better” bill will require that those with disabilities be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour like their able-bodied counterparts. Please urge your senators to pass this important measure and provide long overdue financial equality to all citizens.

Wolf Music Concert

Recently, the NPR program, “Science Friday,” ended with a soundscape of Iberian wolf songs. At first, I thought it was an orchestra imitating the melodies, but realized the howls, yips, yowls weren’t strings or woodwinds, but live wolves. Though I concluded that it was tongue-in-cheek or a joke on the radio audience, my German shepherd guide, Dave, recognized the real thing—immediately. He trotted into our kitchen and moved toward the Alexa, producing the sound.

Nearby, my husband, Bob, said, “He hears his ancestors.”

Dave moved closer. He stood with his ears perked, his tail wagging, so expectant.

“His nose is twitching,” Bob said. “He’s trying to find his canine friends.”

And then, the recording of the wolves’ song ended, and Dave wandered back to his dog pillow and took up his soft, squeaking ball.

“Not nearly as beautiful, is it, Boy?” I asked, rubbing his big head, so like a wolf’s.

But the unmelodious squeak was all Dave had now, so he made it play and challenge me to a game of ball. Soon, he tired of the game and lay back on his big bed to dream of the wolf music.

End of the Era of the Handshake

 

Dr. Fauci suggest that the covid-19 just might be ending the era of the handshake. Should this come to pass, I understand completely and will comply. But as someone totally blind, I will grieve the loss. Some might ask why I’d consider this a loss—handshaking is so formal, even nerdy. But I was nurtured to touch, to hug. My dad was a warm-hearted, charismatic guy without a single sleazy bone or impulse. Had he lived longer, he probably would have had to curb his exuberant greetings.

So, nature plus disability has fed my appreciation of touch. Through the sense, my guide dog communicates all sorts of messages. If he pulls harder, another dog is ahead. If his tail beats into my leg, my husband, kids, or grandkids are approaching. If I feel the harness dip down, Dave is committing the sniffing crime.

Touch not only gives me vital information as I walk independently, it grounds me in reality. If someone says hello, a hand clasp locates the person. My hearing loss doesn’t allow for solid directionality, so I may not face the person accurately. The touch of the hand tells me about size, height, weight, age, and strength, even a bit of personality. It ensures that a real human is before me, not a disembodied voice.

Touch has been so important to me over my life with blindness. I used it in every aspect of parenting, feeding, dressing, diapering, and transporting. Because I couldn’t see my children, I held, hugged, tickled them. I parented them in the manner of a mama chimp, with them in a front pack, backpack, encircled around my shoulders, dangling from one arm. It’s how I grandparent. My grandkids catapult into me. They leap into my lap, crawl onto my shoulders, and swing up to wrap their legs around me. After I leave, our daughter feels crowded, swamped by her kids. “Space,” she calls. “Give me space.”

You see, she can see the two cuties. She doesn’t need the total entanglement I crave. So, no handshakes? The end of this era translates into a wide litany of nos for me. But maybe masks, rubber gloves, protective gear will be ever-necessary. Through the gear, I can still keep track of them, all knotted together and intertwined. I can still fulfill that chimp in me.

Harriet Tubman–banned?

 

 

About a year ago, I blogged about a nasty attack on an innocent Braille cell. Turns out that President Trump banned workers in the Trump tower from installing Braille numbers on the elevators. Now I’ve been known to attack a Braille cell, to go after it with a fingernail when the bumps clump together tighter than unstirred quinoa.

“But it’s required by law,” the workers protested, “the A.D.A.”

“I don’t care if it’s required by the A.D.D. or the I.U.D. or the U.t.i.” (He said something like that).

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised that there was a new ban, this time announced by the secretary of most cabinet posts in the Trump Administration, secretary of the treasury—Steve Mnuchin. “No Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill under Donald Trump’s watch.”

Harriet Tubman, banned? The most famous American slave escapee? The most famous “conductor” of the underground railroad? A Union spy during the Civil War?

Isn’t that like banning I don’t know—someone heroic, inspired, I mean, someone like, um, Moses?

But wait, Harriet was Moses!

Ash Wednesday and Coal Ash

I just read that coal ash pollution is leaking into the ground water at nine power plants in Pennsylvania, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project. This pollution leaves arsenic and other chemicals behind. At one former coal plant near Pittsburgh, arsenic levels in the ground water are 372 times the PA’s safe drinking water standard. And this isn’t just happening in PA. More than 90% of the sites that store coal ash in the US have levels of contamination exceeding the EPA health standards. what is as horrifying, if not more horrifying, is that I find these stories adjacent to news reports exposing one senior official after another using their government positions for personal gain. How many Alabama tornadoes or continued ocean oil spills will it take to turn our leaders back to addressing the human-made climate change that so jeopardizes our children’s and grandchildren’s futures? On this day before Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance and remembrance in the western Christian church, Maybe we can awaken to more long term needs of our planet.

“The Uninhabitable Earth”

The Uninhabitable Earth is a book to be published in April of this year and a book I’ll purchase in multiple copies, for multiple people. The author from the New Yorker Magazine, David Wallace-Wells writes that the goal of only 2% global warming is the floor, not the ceiling. At this point, we have put so much carbon in the air that warming less than that is impossible. This amount most likely means that 150 million people will die from air pollution, excessive heat, and multiple severe storms the like we haven’t experienced. Wallace-Wells says something so startling that one would think it would be seared into my memory forever, but in truth, the horror of the statement sent all my brain cells to combatting it. But I think he said that simply in the last 25 years, we’ve put more carbon into the atmosphere than was emitted in 15 million years. Now, please know to double-check that statistic, but what he said was so grim that I have felt desperate. By 2050 life, even in Scandinavia, will be impossible for periods of time because of extreme heat waves. And talk about an immigrant emergency as some are today—2050 will make that the truly “Trumped-up crisis many think it is. But sarcasm aside, how many of us will be alive in 2050? Not I, but my kids and grandkids, so many people I desperately love. How can we go on using the energy of the 19^th and 20^th centuries? China, even Saudi Arabia, are funding all sorts of solar and renewable projects, and we’re bringing back the energy that had gone bust in the 1950s. Help!