At my first introductory union meeting, after sitting through a PowerPoint presentation, I piped up with a question: “What about disabled workers?” Leadership went quiet. “You should talk to the accommodations center,” they offered, which didn’t exactly answer my question. I wasn’t asking how I should go about filing my individualized accommodations; as a long-time disabled person, I am well aware of the answer. In the months leading up to my first day of work, I had to spend time preparing documents, calling doctors, and setting up meetings with coordinators so they could read all the salient details of my health conditions. Believe me, I am incredibly practiced in the art of the over-share. As Ohio State University law professor Ruth Colker writes, protections for disabled people are highly individualized, with the expectation that inaccessibility is ignored until a disabled person shows up and pushes for access. I didn’t want the answer to be that I should poke and prod at the system and hope it listened to me. I wanted the answer to be that my union, which is in place to protect me as a worker, has a vested interest in my disabled labor.
Here’s what I was asking: given the fact that my workplace had unionized years earlier, negotiating for better wages and more thoughtful grievance procedures (among other things), what steps were taken with me and my body in mind before I walked onto the campus? Of course, I was protected as a standard worker the same way as the rest of my unionized coworkers. I, too, needed lab safety regulations and rules preventing professors from overworking us as TAs. But what was my union’s purpose for me in the current moment, now that the t’s had been crossed and the i’s had been dotted on the bargaining contract?
Certainly, my labor differed from that of my coworkers. I’ve written before about the concept of crip time, which offers the idea that disabled people experience time differently than able-bodied people, including at work. It’s easy to see the conversation around ableism as fundamentally at odds with the workplace — capitalism demands our labor, often physically, and that can be difficult to square with the differing needs of disabled people. But if we learn how to improve workplaces for disabled people, those strides forward can make labor better for everyone. Rather than holding any of us to the impossible standard of capitalism, workplaces should open themselves to the way we work. Unions, then, can play an integral role in this process, with their ability to “[nudge] collective beliefs and norms.” Ideally, union work avoids “reproducing the icky capitalist norms” that we see from bosses, Katie Meyer, a disabled organizer with Boston University’s graduate student union, tells me. Unfortunately, that’s not always how things go.
We know there are fewer roadblocks in negotiations with management if you come to the table with a contract that’s easier for the other side to swallow and if you already intend to ask for things you know your employer is going to hate — better wages, health care, that kind of thing — it can be intimidating to also go to bat for your union’s marginalized members. It’s understandable, but that doesn’t make it right. If the labor movement doesn’t want to replicate “icky capitalist norms,” we can’t put protections for disabled people on the chopping block in the name of bending to the bosses’ expectations. Doing this cuts off the possibility of solidarity at its very root. You can’t demonstrate care for those you have already explicitly ignored.
When I say unions “should” take action or “ideally” do such things, I don’t mean to discredit the wonderful work that unions, including my own, actually do partake in. Instead, I use these words to point out the standard we need to hold them to. Labor issues are, by nature, tied to axes of oppression. When we discuss labor, we also must discuss racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and, of course, ableism. Unions that fail to engage with the ways that marginalized labor differs are failing their rank and file.
Of course, there are problems inherent in the capitalist system that prevent many disabled people from being hired in the first place. Research shows that employers are more reluctant to hire disabled people for union-protected jobs. But that doesn’t mean your workplace is completely able-bodied. “I think that there’s also this assumption that disabled [people] are not in the workforce, yet that is very much not the case,” Meyer says, and she’s right. Disabled people comprise the largest minority worldwide, meaning it is more than likely you already have disabled people in your workplace. Much of the disabled workforce is undisclosed, with a 2020 global survey from the IT and consulting firm Accenture finding that 76% of employees had not fully disclosed their disabilities at work. It is the union’s job, then, to support those employees, making it safe for them to disclose their disabilities — or even, in a better world, making such a disclosure irrelevant.
That can —and should — happen when anti-ableist policies are baked into the bargaining contract, but it can also happen between bargaining sessions, with the union working on community building and support. At BU, Meyer says, they’ve emphasized this work through actions including adjustable accessibility guidelines, accessibility teams for direct actions such as protests, and interpretation at events. They aspire to further these ideals in the future, hoping to do things such as including disability justice texts in their reading groups. These practices are examples of thoughtful ways to act in solidarity with disabled workers beyond the contract. “The labor movement,” Meyer says, “needs to intentionally strive to be anti-ableist, anti-oppressive, [and] anti-racist.” It’s important, then, to hold unions to account the same way we would any body of power. That starts with disabled needs being represented in contract negotiations, but it has to continue long past that.
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