Illustration by Jandos Rothstein
Corporations including Microsoft and Amazon have worked with the advocacy organization Disability:IN, which provides a purportedly objective score for major employers’ disability policies.
Last September, Amazon fired Jordan Flowers, a co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. Flowers believes he was targeted, not only because he is organizing for worker rights, but also because he is disabled. Two weeks later, Disability:IN, an organization that advocates for corporate disability inclusion, promoted a video of disabled people using Amazon’s accessible features. For the past five years, Disability:IN has named Amazon a “Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion.”
Disability:IN is not alone. Together with The Valuable 500 and Purple Tuesday, they claim to inspire businesses to achieve a more inclusive and aware environment for disabled workers. In reality, these organizations disregard the lived realities of disabled workers, and harm labor movements by shielding corporations from the consequences of their abuse. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s work explains, these organizations “steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.”
Disability:IN
More than 400 corporations work with Disability:IN, according to the organization’s website. Its primary programming is the Disability Equality Index (DEI), a “benchmarking tool” that creates a purportedly objective score for major employers’ disability policies.
In 2022, these “objective” scores showed a curious correlation. Of the 241 corporations that scored 100 out of a possible 100 in 2022, 78 percent were “partners” or sponsors of Disability:IN. Those partners include such industry giants as Raytheon, Amazon, and Wells Fargo. Of the 27 companies that received a score of 80, which is the lowest publicly measured metric for the DEI, only 41 percent were listed as “partners” or sponsors.
For example, T-Mobile won Disability:IN’s 2022 Inclusion Award for Employer of the Year just one year after the company’s senior accessibility strategy partner joined their DEI advisory committee. Less than three months later, a group of T-Mobile employees announced they were forming a union, citing mass layoffs and recent pay reductions.
Shortly after the T-Mobile workers union was announced, the National Labor Relations Board ordered T-Mobile to disband a fake, corporate-controlled union the company had created back in 2016. Fake unions, which “make workers feel heard without having any real power to press for better pay or hours,” have been outlawed in the United States since the 1930s.
Disability:IN awarded Microsoft its top Inclusion Award for Employer of the Year in 2015. Jenny Lay-Flurrie, chief accessibility officer of Microsoft, was one of Disability:IN’s board members at the time. The following year, Lay-Flurrie took on a more prominent board role as vice chair, and served as board chair of Disability:IN from 2017-2023.
During her tenure, Disability:IN has consistently aligned itself with institutions that harm workers, such as Seattle’s Northwest Center, which was fined in 2018 for paying disabled employees less than the city’s minimum wage without obtaining a certificate from the city that would allow for an exemption. This context complicates Lay-Flurrie’s seemingly righteous support of the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act, proposed legislation designed to end the practice of paying disabled workers a subminimum wage.
Flurrie tweeted her support for the congressional bill, hours after Bloomberg revealed that “47 workers building a Microsoft data center were fired for staging a work stoppage, protesting wage theft, and trying to organize with the Carpenters union.” Prior to this, Microsoft spent much of 2022 riding a wave of good press after announcing they had adopted a set of “principles for employee organizing and engagement with labor organizations.”
Meanwhile, Disability:IN spent a whopping $1,582,823 on executive salaries and only $35,700 on grants in 2020. When the half-million dollars Disability:IN spent on three executive consultants is factored in, their nearly 60:1 executive pay-to-grant ratio raises questions about why these corporate-funded advocacy organizations are eligible for nonprofit status.
The Valuable 500
The Valuable 500 represents a community, not of disabled workers, but of “Global CEOs committed to disability inclusion in business.” The organization claims these CEOs and companies are spearheading programs and services that will improve the social and economic lives of disabled people all over the world.
The Valuable 500 gets little social media engagement from disabled people as they announce initiatives, issue press releases, and release sleek reports, such as their 2022 Truth survey, which actually revealed a 4 percent decrease in the companies in their network that had an accessibility policy in place.
One of the Valuable 500’s companies, Verizon, is also a partner of Generation Valuable, a one-year leadership program intended to accelerate hiring and advancement for disabled people. The program provides training (including in “Personal Identity Development”) and a C-suite level mentor, along with networking opportunities.
Verizon CEO and Chairman Hans Vestberg says that “everyone should have access to the same opportunities.” But his company keeps getting hit with violations from the National Labor Relations Board, most recently for firing a worker after he organized a successful union campaign. Avoiding this apparent disconnect, the Valuable 500’s “Standards & Practices” state, “We don’t control our companies or the work they do outside of inclusion.”
The Valuable 500’s criteria allows for an internal selection process while also limiting eligible participants to individuals with five years of management experience. So Verizon controls who gets into the program. Critics believe it to be little more than a casting call for corporate-branded disabled “leaders” who can be groomed into avatars for abled professionals, rather than promoting and compensating all disabled workers better.
As Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, programs like Generation Valuable and NextGen bolster their organizations, because “oppressors do not favor promoting the community as a whole, but rather selected leaders.”
Purple Tuesday
Disability employment isn’t the primary focus for Purple Tuesday, a U.K.-based program that is more focused on improving disabled customer experiences. Purple Tuesday started in 2018, as an annual accessible shopping day on the first Tuesday of November. Participating organizations are supposed to make at least one annual public commitment to make the customer experience more inclusive.
When asked how they actually ensure participants follow through on their public commitments, founder Mike Adams said, “We are not auditors,” though the Purple Tuesday website advertises three auditing services: a “digital accessibility audit,” a “physical site access audit,” and “an audit of your recruitment process.”
A recent promotion shows Purple Tuesday’s attempted expansion into disabled workers. A program called Participant Plus, offered at £99, allows businesses to show how they are making themselves more accessible. But the promotion merely links to a Shopify page, where the right to use the Purple Tuesday 2023 logo can be purchased, alongside a branded sweatshirt, mug, T-shirt, and tote bag.
In 2019, disabled activists called for a boycott of Purple Tuesday due to its relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which uses CCTV footage to surveil disability benefit claimants. Sainsbury’s, which says it is a proud supporter of Purple Tuesday, has admitted to sharing CCTV footage of disabled benefit claimants upon request by the DWP. Activists were concerned that more companies could share this footage with the DWP as evidence to deny benefit claims to disabled people. Since then, Purple Tuesday’s 2022 Global Headline Partner, eBay, was caught unlawfully “surveilling union activity.”
Asked about these issues in 2021 by Disability News Service, Adams tried to defend his organization’s role as a “catalyst for change,” before abruptly ending the interview.
The call for a Purple Tuesday boycott shows what happens when disabled people begin to look past the corporate disability inclusion hype. Very few disabled workers have ever heard of these organizations. For those who have, it is incredibly difficult to untangle what they do from what they claim. It is not yet known the extent to which they are undermining grassroots workplace disability activism, because so few people are paying attention. But that is beginning to change.
