The architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act, former Democratic Iowa senator Tom Harkin, discussed the importance of disability legislation on Wednesday as the featured speaker of the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy’s Annual Distinguished Lecture. Harkin’s lecture, titled “True Integration: Meaningful Work for People with Disabilities,” celebrated the expansion of rights for Americans with disabilities since the 1990 passage of the ADA, but criticized the lack of progress made in government policies to encourage economic self-sufficiency for citizens with disabilities.

Early in Harkin’s political career, he was recruited by fellow Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat who represented Massachusetts from 1962 until his death in 2009, to draft legislation for the rights of the disabled. A leaflet distributed before the lecture containing a brief biography of Harkin explained, “What emerged from this legislation would later become his signature legislative achievement — The Americans with Disabilities Act.”

Rather than discuss his role in the drafting and passage of the ADA — “That’s fine, [but] a lot of people [were] involved in that,” he said — Harkin spent the lecture discussing his career and the experiences he had while campaigning for citizens with disabilities. Harkin grew up with a deaf brother, which contributed to his interest in the difficulty of getting access to closed-captioning in TV programming. To watch TV with captions at that time, consumers had to buy a $279 set-top box — more than $500 in today’s dollars — that could decode the caption signals being broadcast. 

“I had someone come to me and say, ‘You know, new technology, they can have a chip just as big as your thumbnail and put [it] in your TV set that will do all that that big box can do,’” Harkin said. As then-chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Disability Policy, Harkin held hearings to assess the viability of requiring TV manufacturers to put those chips in their TV sets. TV set manufacturers protested the proposal, arguing that it would increase the cost of TVs by at least $100. 

“So I got ahold of my friend in the chip business [at] Intel and asked, ‘Is that true?’” Harkin recounted. “He said, ‘Well, yeah, if you make a hundred of them, or a thousand. But if you make millions of them, it’ll hardly cost anything!’” 

With this information, Harkin was able to convince his fellow representatives of the viability of his initiative. Called the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990, the legislation was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in October of 1990, the same year the ADA was passed. The law stipulated that TV manufacturers needed to put caption chips in all TVs that were 13 inches or bigger within five years. Harkin said the TDCA demonstrated the far-reaching impact of disability legislation. “When you do something in disability policy to meet the needs of a segment or a group, more often than not it benefits everybody.”

Harkin said that the TDCA improved the lives of almost every American, not just those with disabilities. Several times during his lecture, Harkin mentioned “universal design,” the attitude that design that accommodates people with disabilities often benefits people without disabilities.  This is also known as the “curb-cut effect,” a term coined in the 1970s when researchers discovered that wheelchair-accessible slopes in the curbs at intersections in Berkeley, California helped all pedestrians. Similarly, the caption decoders made mandatory by the TDCA led to the use of closed captioning in other places, such as sports bars, Harkin said.

Harkin also explained that prior to the passage of the ADA, few companies realized the value employees with disabilities could bring to their company. When his deaf brother Frank graduated from the Iowa School for the Deaf he was told that he could be “three things: a baker, a shoe cobbler or a printer’s assistant,” Harkin explained. Frank wanted to work in a job with engineering or manufacturing and felt deeply frustrated by his limited options, according to Harkin. Then, the owner of the Delevan Corporation, a jet engine nozzle manufacturing plant, hired Frank. “As he told me later, ‘I hired your brother because I liked him, I felt sorry for him, and sort of out of the goodness of my heart I figured that I would take care of him,’” Harkin explained. “Where he was working was very noisy, and lots of drills going and banging and clanging and people shouting. Didn’t bother him a bit. He just kept right on working.”

Harkin explained that currently 65 percent of adults with disabilities “who can work, who want to work, are not in the workforce.” Those that are employed often “work for low wages or sub-minimum wage jobs, in what I call dead-end jobs.” He called this “a blot on our national character.” 

Returning to the ADA, Harkin said, “The Americans with Disabilities Act had four goals: full participation, equal opportunity, independent living and economic self-sufficiency. … On the first three, we’ve done pretty well. We’ve moved the needle. But on economic self-sufficiency we haven’t even moved the needle. In 28 years. We’re [in] about the same place we were when we passed the ADA.”

Harkin said that he believes there are two reasons the private sector doesn’t employ more workers with disabilities. First, most private companies don’t measure disability in their diversity portfolios the way they measure things like race and sex. Second, Harkin believes that many unemployed Americans with disabilities are unsure that they will be treated with respect by their coworkers if they start working. 

Harkin also noted that many programs that are designed to empower workers with disabilities don’t give them opportunities to fail and learn from their mistakes. Teenagers without disabilities often work summer jobs to help develop their work ethics, but teenagers with disabilities rarely get this chance. Harkin believes there is still important work to be done — shortly after announcing his retirement from the Senate in 2013, he founded the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement at Drake University in his home state of Iowa.

As Harkin spoke, two sign language interpreters took turns signing his speech. At the conclusion of the event, Lurie Institute Director Monika Mitra presented Harkin with a plaque recognizing his contribution to disability policy.