I was heartened to read this news story about the Texas Tech professor, Michael Collier, who won his discrimination suit against Texas Tech. It's very hard to prove job discrimination, especially when you have a major disability such as deafness. As for the professor, here's the rundown on how the discrimination took place:
Michael L. Collier, a deaf, tenure-track assistant professor hired to teach American Sign Language and other courses relating to deaf culture, was abruptly dismissed in October 2006.
The jury found Collier's disability was directly related to his termination.
...
Suppe informed Collier that his contract would not be renewed halfway through his second semester with no prior counseling, discussion or opportunity for corrective action. Suppe wouldn't give Collier an explanation as to why he was being dismissed.
"They basically fired him out of the blue - a sucker punch," Schmidt said. "They wouldn't meet with him, wouldn't talk with him; (they) put him under the supervision of lower-ranked people and treated him like a second-class citizen."
This has happened to me before. I've heard many stories from my deaf friends about how they were discriminated against at their places of employment.
Where they're infantilized, talked down to, ignored, stuck off in some corner, and never asked about how they can contribute to the team. Their coworkers don't bother to bounce ideas off my deaf friends, thinking it'd be too much trouble to send an e-mail or an IM chat. As a result, they feel isolated, and not a part of the team. When they do try to contribute, they're not understood and not taken seriously.
And yes, through that sort of infantilization by their employers and co-workers, they feel they'll never be able to climb their way up the ladder. Too many of my deaf friends think they won't ever earn more than what they're making now.
Even though we've made major strides in supporting the rights of those with disabilities, we still have a long way to go in eradicating the persistent employment gap for people with disabilities, especially with deaf people.
So if you are an employer that has deaf employees, please do your best to involve them, and ask them to contribute through different forms of communication, whether it be on paper, e-mail, IM, or TTY if they cannot communicate verbally. If you are a coworker and you have a fellow deaf co-worker, please involve that deaf person as well.
Erase the hate.
Erase the discrimination.
Speak up.
Get involved.
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