Monday, April 5, 2021
The LPE of Disability Accommodations
Over at the LPE Blog, Professor Shirley Lin writes about the law and political economy of disability accommodations. A defining feature of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the accommodations mandate was drafted with a transformative social model of disability in mind. However, Congress essentially delegated the design for this mandate to the Reagan-era EEOC, which in turn operationalized accommodations through de facto bargaining between employees and employers. By evaluating new empirical evidence relating to race, class, and gender and the theories underlying the mandate, her forthcoming article argues that market logic further limited its redistributive work and society’s ability to critique its effectiveness. In response, her article proposes reallocations of power so that the state can: gather and publicize organizational precedent to enable structural analysis and regulation at scale; legally recognize that dismantling ableist environments and discrimination are collective endeavors; and expand the social insurance model for accommodations through tax policy. Read more here.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/human_rights/2021/04/the-lpe-of-disability-accommodations.html