There are 58 million Americans with physical and mental disabilities. If you have a disability in the U.S, you’re twice as likely to be poor as someone without a disability. You’re also far more likely to be unemployed. According to the Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell University, 28.4 percent of disabled adults worked in 1990, compared with 14.4 percent in 2013. And that gap has widened in the 25 years since the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted. The ADA banned discrimination based on disability and was intended to ensure equal opportunity in employment — as well as government services and public accommodations, commercial facilities and public transportation.
Just having a job is highly unusual for someone with a disability. Fewer than 1 in 5 disabled adults are employed, one reason so many are poor. Problems involve available and adequate transport designed to take them in wheelchairs, the lack of ramps into buildings, lifts onto buses and access to trains. Once in a place of work, there is no room to manoeuver your wheelchair. If you are manually handicapped, using a mouse can be a very slow process. Many companies think the disabled to be not up to the job, any job, or they think hiring them is not worth the effort. Some employers are scared to hire the disabled because they don’t know what kind of accommodations they require. And if they don’t meet what is considered to be reasonable accommodations, they’re afraid of being sued.
The system is not set up to succeed. If recipients of federal disability payments save more than $2,000, they risk losing their benefits, including medical care. So people have to hide their savings or the benefits are cut off (this is being eased somewhat). (based an article by NPR)
Europeans are light years ahead of America in dealing with the disabled. Every London tube train, every bus and a lot of offices are disability-friendly, and the stigma against the disabled seems to have disappeared. Indeed, when I ran a company we had to show that we employed at least one disabled person. When I read the NPR article I did smile: the hand-out trap exists in Britain as well, and Conservative governments are ever anxious to cut subsidies to the poor and disabled. If you get a disability income from the government and put aside enough money to buy a car to get to a place of work, for instance, the government promptly cuts your income. This policy arises from a basic belief that the poor are poor because they are lazy good-for-nothings, which may be true ten per cent of the time (?). Epicurus wouldn’t expect the disabled necessarily to be rich, but he would have expected them to be able to live with minimum anxiety and maximum self-respect.