A Collective Good: Disability Diversity as a Value in Public Sector Collective Bargaining Agreements

Abstract

Historically, people with disabilities have had low wages and high rates of job insecurity and unemployment. Being in unionized workplaces may improve their fates. This paper is an empirical study of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) from the current contracts database of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), examined through the lens of law and society scholarship, disability studies, and U.S. labor law. I am interested in how employment law scholarship in disability rights can contribute to labor law and how labor law can strengthen employment rights.Given that labor unions are espousing disability as a value in diversifying the workforce, their CBAs, as the rules of the road in the workplace, should reflect certain themes of disability diversity, including disability as a matter of nondiscrimination on par with other minority issues, disability in the context of equal pay, and affinity groups for workers with disabilities. The CBAs set not only the relationship between the employer and the union, but also between the union and its members. If the CBA, therefore, treats disability as a valued minority group experience, the workplace culture itself might reflect greater inclusion and respect for disability.Preliminary findings suggest that the CBAs do not reflect disability under a civil rights model, but rather a perspective on disability that makes distinctions between different kinds of disabilities and how they are acquired. Overall, the tone of the CBAs medicalizes disability as a workplace experience. A few CBAs, however, stand out as models for fostering disability awareness and respect in the workplace and in unions. These CBAs recognize disability as a minority group experience, replete with a long history of social isolation, economic alienation, and structural disenfranchisement. With the current strength of union organizing being in the U.S. in the public sector, these exemplars can provide windows into how to organize existing workers with disabilities and also include more people with disabilities as part of labor organizing and the strengthening of that movement. The disability rights movement could also be enhanced by developing a stronger relationship with the labor movement. The CBAs provide some first steps to envisioning how this dialogue and the diversification of both movements might happen.