The Extent and Effect of Employer Compliance with the Accommodations Mandates of the Americans with Disabilities Act
Abstract
Using data from several waves of the National Institute on Aging's Health and Retirement Study, the author of this article evaluates whether employers have complied with the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that they (a) accommodate workers who become disabled while in their employ and (b) not pass on the costs of that treatment in the form of lower wages. The author also examines the impact of accommodations on improved job attachment. Study results suggest that workers were accommodated slightly more after the passage of the ADA than before, though in certain specific ways only. Workers appear to have paid for their accommodations in the form of lower wages. Finally, the author shows that accommodation has been very effective at increasing job attachment for individuals with disabilities, but this effectiveness has lessened with time since the ADA's passage.
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1.
1. Thanks to Charles Brown, Olivia Mitchell, John Abowd, Ronald Ehrenberg, Jeffrey Dominitz, Walter Oi, Gary Solon, and espe-cially John Bound, and to seminar participants at the University of Michigan and Syracuse University for helpful comments.
2.
2. The data and programs used in this article are available from the author upon request.
3.
1. Countless empirical studies have identified the tendency toward nonwork among individuals with disabilities. This strong tendency has been confirmed by the fact that large-scale micro surveys, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, typically define disability as the presence of a physical condition that limits, prevents, or otherwise constrains the ability of the individual to perform market work.
4.
2. I did not study whether there has been a change in the percentage of persons with disabilities in the typical workforce. Ideally, employer-level employment data, which we do not possess, are needed to answer this question.
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3. Thirty percent of respondents had accommodated a worker with disabilities before passage of the ADA. Most of these accommodations cost less than $500 and generally posed “no problem” for the employer. However, employers were asked only about direct cost outlays, not about other costs that are likely to be associated with accommodations, such as those related to time.
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4. I emphasize this point because the overall labor market conditions of workers with disabilities could have changed in the wake of the ADA for reasons having nothing to do with accommodations. For example, irrespective of how employers complied with the accommodations mandates, the employment experiences of workers with disabilities might have changed because of how the law affected their attitudes toward work.
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5. For a large portion of the sample, I was unable to determine whether the worker was covered by a disability insurance plan at the onset employer. This variable was excluded from the analysis.
8.
6. I also estimated bivariate probit models of the type suggested by Heckman (1978), which rely on nonlinearity assumptions to identify the accommodation's effect on job separation. These estimates are quite similar to those presented here, but they are much less efficiently estimated.
9.
7. In some specifications, I used interactions between the accident-at-work variable and characteristics of the employer. None of these models performed better than the basic model presented here, with only the binary accident-at-work variables as an instrument.
10.
8. These recollection problems may be particularly large in this study because the people have disabilities that may have adversely affected memory.
References
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Article first published: Fall 2004
Issue published: Fall 2004
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