Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to today''s conference call entitled National EEOC and ADA Research Project: What Does the Data Tells Us About Title I Complaints and Resolutions? At this time, all participants will be in a listen only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing the one on your touch tone phone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today March 20th. I now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Peter Berg. Please go ahead Sir.
Thank you very much, and good afternoon to everyone and welcome to the ADA Audio Conference Series, which is a collaborative effort of the DBTAC Regional ADA Centers. For those of you joining us for the first time, DBTAC stands for the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers. We are funded through the U.S. Department of Education. Approximately seven to ten business days following today''s audio conference, there will be a text transcript as well as the audio archive of today''s session available on the ADA Audio home page. You can locate that at www.ada-audio.org. For additional information about the audio conference series or questions involving the ADA or other federal disability laws, you can contact your regional ADA center by calling 1-800-949-4232. As the Operator mentioned, we are going to take a look at the National EEOC Research Project which is housed at the Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU, and today we are very pleased to have with us Brian McMahon who is a PHD, CRC as well as a few other titles. Brian is a full professor at VCU, and he holds appointments in four different schools at VCU including appointments in the School of Medicine, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. You can read more about Brians qualifications and background as well as lists of articles that in other materials that Brian has published by visiting the ADA Audio home page and clicking on the link for speakers and you will find all of Brian''s materials. So Brian wanted us to get quickly to the topic today. He has a lot of information to share and I''m sure that there will be a lot of questions. So without further ado, I will turn it over to Brian.
Peter, thank you very much and I want thank Robin who will be joining us a little later and all the folks from the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Centers network who made this presentation possible. Also I want to thank my friends and colleagues at the EEOC, former chair Cari Dominguez who makes the data available to us to do these studies, as well as Dr. Ron Edwards from the EEOCs Research Office who is a close colleague without whom we cannot continue. I do want to say that the data is made available to us at VCU by virtue of inter agency personnel agreement between the Federal Government, the EEOC specifically and the Commonwealth of Virginia, VCU specifically and in effect, this makes me a 0-dollar employee of the EEOC and allows me to have access for closely supervised research purposes to the data that we are going to talk about today. Although, I do have an IPA with the EEOC, I want make very clear that I am speaking to you today in my capacity as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, and that the findings, conclusions, and inferences that I make from the data that we study are not those of the EEOC. I also want to point out that what we are doing today in the next 45 minutes is an overview of the project. The project now has completed over 50 studies that are published or submitted for publication, excuse me, over 40 studies. And in 45 minutes, there is really no way to give you the details of those. What I hope to convey to you by the end of the next 40 minutes or so, is the nature and scope of the project what can be done with the data and what kinds of research questions we can answer for you if you would like to pose them to us to frame our research agenda going forward. I also do promise to give you some limited number of findings that we think are particularly interesting and shed a great deal of light on the nature and scope of workplace discrimination in America, vis-a-vis , Title I of the ADA. Moving along, I do make the assumption that, this is a very ADA literate audience. That people understand the Act, they know the basic features of the Act, they know that the Title I refers to the employment provisions, that the primary enforcement agency is the EEOC. For those, who are a little bit less literate, the only thing you need to know for purposes of today to hang in there with us is that, all personnel actions under the Act must be unrelated to the existence or consequence of the disability, as disability is define in the Act. If you understand that one sentence, that will keep you with us for purposes of today and we''ll get through this just fine. I guess by way of a good foundation, I also want people to understand that as for almost 35 years now, I have been a practitioner or a professor in the area of workplace discrimination and disability. And the people on this call understand full well that workplace discrimination is very substantial barrier to employment for people with disabilities in America. However, it is not the only such impediments or barrier. There are financial disincentives to work, there is instability in the economy, there are labor market fluctuations, there is the availability of health care and problems with the availability of health care for people with disabilities. There is the outsourcing of jobs, there are other future issues down the road, perhaps like a perspective guest worker program. All of these have the potential or in reality do represent different barriers to the labor market activity rate in this country for people with disabilities, which always lags regrettably somewhere between 25 and 30 percent. Comparing that to about 80 percent for a population of people without disabilities. So the eradication if you will of workplace discrimination, which is what ADA intends, would not in and of itself eliminate all the problems we have in labor market participation. It is one barrier of many, although it is probably until recently, one of the least researched barriers and it really is high time we feel that we got some interesting data and interesting findings that we could begin answering some questions about it. So around the fourth slide, if you are following the slides, if have you those available to them, if you dont, again you can download those later from the ADA Audio home page that Peter mentioned. We have the question what is in this database? Well, what we have is today, 369,000 closed allegations over the first 13 years since the effective date of the Title I of the ADA. I hasten to add all these allegations are closed allegations, they are not allegations that are currently open in process or currently under investigation. That is very, very important to this research group. They do meet certain extraction criteria that is set by the research team. For example, we don''t study certain types of allegations, we don''t study allegations that are being investigated by the state Fair Employment Practice agencies, only by the EEOC. For example, we don''t study allegations of retaliation. Because those are not necessarily related to the existence or consequence of disability, but rather to whatever it is the employer alleged to be retaliating against the person for doing, which may or may not have anything to do with the disability. In fact, the point person may well not be a person when disability at all. This database grows at about 5 percent per year. So we recently updated the database only this past week through September 30th, 2005 and now we have slightly over 369,000 allegations that are that current. So approximately, a little more than a year, a year and the half old. We try to update the database bi-annually, every two years. What do we know? What information do we have in the database? First with respect to what some of you would call consumers or people with disabilities, but what the EEOC refers to as the charging parties, people who bring forth the complaint or an allegation. There''s four things about them we are interested. We are interested in their unique and known impairments, we are interested in their race, gender and age. What about the employers, the people against whom the allegations are brought. The EEOC refers to these as respondents. What we know about them, is they are industry grouping and we have recently as last week modified these to conform with the 2002 North American Industry Classification System. So we know what industries people are in, we know the number of employees approximately that work in that particular organization at the location and we know the location of the employer, which we choose to code by region. Both US census region and the DBTAC region, that which is the same as the Department of Education region that the employer would fall in. This allows us to get some geographic sense of how discrimination is behaving. Well other than knowing these things about the charging party and these other things about the respondent or employer, what else do we know? Well it is important that we know what type of discriminatory behavior has been alleged, and these things are called issues. Even though there is a field of about 40 or 45 issues, there is really only any meaningful activity in the top 25. After that there is not enough activity to really merit much scrutiny or examination on our part. We''ll talk about what those 25 issues are, but to give you an example, you may be discriminated against because you feel you were unlawfully terminated or somebody refused to hire you or refused to accommodate you or doesn''t pay you the same as a person without a disability. These are all examples of personnel issues which relate to the type of discriminatory behavior and I think you get a sense of what that particular dimension stands for. Last but not least, we know the outcome or resolution of the allegation, again, we are not interested here in studying allegations that did not, are not closed out. So we, it is one thing bring an allegation, but an allegation is a perception or complaint that you have been discriminated against and only when that allegation is resolved by the EEOC do we get a sense of whether the allegation has merit or does not have merit. And so we code the allegations accordingly as merit or non-merit allegations. Around the 5th slide, you will find Figure 1 which shows graphically, these five major variables of analysis. You can see in the green box, information about the claimant or charging party. You can see all the way on the right side, information about the employer, which includes their size, industry code and the location. You can see in the orange box, types of issues or discriminatory behaviors that might be alleged. And you can see various subcategories in the blue box on the far right of various types of outcome indicators, whether the allegation has merit, in which case the EEOC believed there was cause to conclude that discrimination did occur or whether the allegation does not have merit. And all the yellow arrows show you the kinds of things we study, which is the interactions of all those variables, sometimes two things at a time, sometimes three things at a time. I guess what we would, the question we are frequently asked is, what impairments are available for you to study? If you look on the next slide, you will see we have 6 categories of impairments which we use as comparison groups. If we want to create disability specific profiles of workplace discrimination, the first and the largest category is general disability that includes basically every condition that is known and that is physical or sensory or neurological. Theres about 40 or so impairments in that category alone, excuse me, about 35. And there are about 200,000 allegations in that category, far and away the largest that we have. The second is psychiatric impairments, with 50,000 allegations. The third is chemical dependence, the fourth is other disabilities and these are allegations brought by people with disabilities and the disability cannot be coded because either the person will not disclose the disability or because it is a rare disorder and does not conform to the existing impairment categories. We also have about 40,000 allegations relating to the second prong and third prong, excuse me, the other prongs of the ADA definition, such as people who are regarded as disabled or have a record of disability but who are not disabled under the Act in the present time. And finally, we have about 3,500 allegations of persons who file a complaint because of their association with a qualified person with a disability. If we look quickly through the next few slides, you begin to see in more details what these categories include. Again, general disability, which we will call GENDIS, is known physical, sensory or neurological impairments. And so when you are creating a disability specific profile, for example of diabetes, you would isolate the 11,000 allegations for diabetes and compare them against the balance of GENDIS, what remains in GENDIS without replacement, which are all the other categories you see in blue. Allergy, asthma, back, chemical sensitive, HIV, blood disorders and cancer and so on, there''s about 30 or 35 conditions in there, that again represent sensory, neurological or physical impairments. This is how an individual profile, a disability specific profile is created. If you go to the next slide, you will see the psychiatric conditions, again about 50,000 allegations, involving anxiety, depressions, bipolar illness, schizophrenia or other psychiatric impairments. If you go to the next slide, you will see about 7,000 allegations, all closed. Again, all of these are closed allegations, where the merit or lack of merit is known, relating to alcoholism or drug dependence. If you go to the next slide, you will see about 70,000 others. Again we know that these are physical, sensory or neurological, but the specific impairment is not known. If you go to the next slide, you will see about 44,000 regarded as or record of disability, and about 3,500 relationship or association of people with a disabilities. That gives you a sense of the size, the scope of database in terms of impairments. These definitions are probably again well-known to this group thats ADA literate, but they are provided for you as a matter of record or future reference. Now, we are at about the 12th slide, and this is I guess this is what we would call the money slide. This is what we are asked to do by EEOC and by our funding source NIDRR. We are in the business of creating these profiles, if you will of disability specific patterns of workplace discrimination. So what is unique in terms of the other variables about workplace discrimination, for example, for people with diabetes, or hearing impairment, or multiple sclerosis or HIV. Those are things that we are beginning now to understand better. The next is what is unique and how does workplace discrimination for disability interact with a person''s gender, race or age. We can also create up to 20 different unique industry specific patterns. So what does ADA Title I discrimination look like in manufacturing or higher education or health care or the hospitality industry and so on. We can look at the impact of the employers size or location. Those are things that were presently been very involved with since our study in 2003 in the bibliography that you have been provided with, on the home page, outlines about 28 studies that are completed and that you can read about finding the literature to date. And as we speak, there''s about 12 more that are under review by different journals around the country and around the world. We can also do issue-specific analyses. And by, this we''ll talk about this in a moment. But by this, we mean what is the nature and scope of things like disability harassment, failure to accommodate, unlawful discharged, failure to hire, disparity or unequal treatment and training, in matters of discipline, in-compensation. So those are all different issues and we can begin to take them issue by issue. But one thing the database tells us very quickly is which study should we begin with? Or probably those that are most prevalent or most common. We are also able to take snapshots of the impact that various court decisions particularly Supreme Court decisions, so we will explain to you later how we looked at for example, the Sutton decision which is quite famous or infamous depending on your point of view. And we will look at how that decision did in point of fact, listening and talking, listening to the data, not to the media, not to the sometimes inflated projections of people in the media or even in consumer groups or even among employers about what impact did the Supreme Court decisions have on EEOC complaint and resolution activity. We are also able to take virtually any issue or any population and find out what drives merit. I think everybody can understand if you try to look at workplace discrimination like a crime, that it''s one thing that there are many crimes first of all that go unreported. There''s a smaller number of crimes that are reported, well thats what we are working with, we can only work with crimes that are reported to the EEOC. There is a smaller number of those that have merit, just like there is a large number of unreported crimes than reported crimes than a smaller number of indictments and a smaller number of convictions in criminal law, so it is with civil law, that these pools get smaller and smaller, and its good to know though what some of the parameters are. There are some things we have been asked to study, we just don''t have the personnel to do, like how does ADA compare and how is it playing out when you compare to other Civil Rights statutes and so on. I want keep the focus on the slide for a minute because I want give you a sense of how the team views workplace discrimination. There are many, many ways you can look at it. We have a DBTAC in Oakland, which is very high quality program that runs from a public health institute. They may take a view and we share this view in our School of Allied Health at VCU that, workplace discrimination can be viewed as a disease or a virus or an infectious disease that pops itself up all over the place and different parts of the country and different industries and effects different populations and sub-populations differently, and so people in the public health, all the epidemiologists, all the researchers that study public health want to document that. Because the more you know about a disease, the more you can combat it. Prior to my study of this particular matter, I was involved in studies of hate crimes. And we did a series of publications and presentations around the country on hate crimes and disability, using data received from the FBI. Well, you know that FBI keeps very copious statistics of all kinds of crime rates including hate crimes around the country, and that is how you begin to know where and how to deploy your forces. You can also look at it workplace discrimination as clearly the enemy from a military standpoint. We don''t think of employers as the enemy, but we do think of these regrettable behaviors that they sometimes engage in as being unlawful and is being bad and we want to eradicate them or at least minimize them. Well, certainly it occurs to you then that just as it is in public health, law enforcement or the military, you want to know your enemy. You want to understand this phenomenon of workplace discrimination. The more you know about it and the greater detail you can describe it, the more you can deploy the resources that we have to combat workplace discrimination and the more effective you can be. You''ll see examples of this as we proceed. So let''s get a feel now for some of the fun things in our work, some of the specific studies and findings. But before we do, please understand when I say that there are no differences, I mean that there are no differences in the nature or scope of discrimination between the target group and a comparison group. Any time you hear a research in this area say there are no differences, please do not interpret that to mean there is no discrimination. Everything we study is discrimination. We are doing our studies within the universe of workplace discrimination. No differences means no uniqueness to the target group. It does not mean no discrimination it just means that the target groups discrimination looks pretty much like everybody''s pattern of discrimination. Okay. Let''s go ahead and ask some questions. True or false, in disability world, most allegations of workplace discrimination are resolved in favor of the person with the disability. Well, again this a pretty ADA literate audience, very much so and I''m sure you know the answer to this. The answer if you go to the next slide is false. As a matter of fact, in the data that we have, the way we categorize merit versus non-merit, a merit resolution in which discrimination has been actually demonstrated, is found to occur in about 22 percent of all the allegations brought. So 78 percent, generally speaking, will be found to not have merit, and 22 percent will be found to have merit. Now, we are always somewhat reluctant in public audiences or in the media in particular, to reveal statistics like this because reporters will shove a microphone in our face and say doesnt this mean that? There''s a lot of frivolous litigation going on, doesn''t this mean that the ADA is a bad law, doesnt it mean it should be repealed or maybe even be amended and the answer is well, certainly not. This figure of 20, 22, 23 percent, this figure holds up almost regardless of the statute that you are looking at. This figure is about the same in what you would find in the Civil Rights Acts for almost all protected classes and so, my answer is always, well, if you feel that way because of that number and you want to repeal the ADA, then please consider repealing the Civil Rights Act as well. It''s very consistent finding. That is also much higher merit rate than people will find if they go to court and take their case to court. And if they say take your chances in court, well your likely hood of getting a favorable jury verdict in an ADA related matter is well under 5 percent. Let''s look at next slide of question. We''re now around Slide 16. True or false, lacking resources, small employers are likely to engage if discriminatory behavior, after all they don''t have sophisticated human resource departments? They don''t have people that have the time, the energy, the inclination or the money to go to ADA training such as provided by the DBTACs. Well that question of course, surprisingly to us is false. Size does matter, and if you look on the next slide, employers over 500, their levels of complaints filed against them are far greater than any other group, 15-100 would be next. And 100-200, and 200-500 is about the same. This really is counter intuitive. If you stop to think that 80 percent of all American workers work in organizations of 200 or less and that these organizations certainly don''t have the human resources sophistication that large employers have, yet large employers receive far more allegations even with 20 percent of the workforce operating. So it is counter intuitive. I''m sure you have explanations, I have explanations, but right now I just like to throw that out in front of you, and then we will move ahead. True or false, in disability world, most workplace discrimination is related to hiring? This is perhaps, the most high-impact slide in finding that we''ll see. If you look on the next slide, that''s false and have you what we call the hit parade of issues. If you look at the top six or seven issues, by the way, they account for three quarters of all allegations of workplace discrimination under Title I. So, I try to tell my graduate students in our ADA course here, at VCU, you know, you are supposed should become expert to some degree in all the 25 EEOC issues in which discrimination may occur. But if you want to put your law enforcement or public health or crime fighting resources some place, why not put it where the action is? Where the activity is and where the enemy exists? And as you can see, termination and if you couple that with the far right-hand column of constructive discharge, these account for almost one-third of all ADA Title 1 related allegations, followed by reasonable accommodation, disability harassments, the terms of conditions of employment, and hiring. Next category happens to be discipline. Well, think about that for a moment especially those of us who are in the ADA business in one way or another. I look back on all the trainings I have done with employers over the years since ADA was even anticipated and even going back to the Rehab Act of 1973 in Title V. And half of my training content and half of my examples, at least would be devoted to hiring. And another 30 percent probably, to reasonable accommodation and 10 or 20 percent everything else. Well, that''s a big mistake on my part. My bad. Because as you can see, if I was listening to the numbers that access to the fact at the time, I would be much smarter about how I do my research and how I approach my training. Now the next three years, we have done very detailed study of disability harassment, but we are going to study termination, reasonable accommodations, the terms and conditions of employment and hiring. And really do a series of studies about each one using different analytical techniques which help us really understand thinking about reasonable accommodation. What impairment groups are most affected by the failure to accommodate? Which ones have the highest merit rates, as well as which employers of what size, what industry and even what parts of the United States? Again, this allows for a reallocation of resources that we are all involved with, with trying to combat this problem of workplace discrimination and disability in a way that makes some sense and some logic and we will give us the biggest return on our investment. I know everybody on this phone call is interested in doing that. I know the employers are, I know the rehab providers are, I know the government agencies are in particular the EEOC, I know the academics are, I know the consumers are. We all want these numbers to come down. But if we customize and modify our military, if you will, to conform to the facts on the ground, which is this is where the enemy is, we can be much more effective and efficient in our struggle against workplace discrimination. Going to the next slide, you see it this way. If there is problems in hiring, yes, there are, but they are far more problems in the quality of work with respect to workplace discrimination and there are far more problems in that than the areas of job retention. The issues related to keeping a job are far more active in terms of workplace discrimination activity than either the quality of work or hiring put together. This is really important for another reason. Stated differently what does this mean? If ADA isnt anti-discrimination law and if most workplace discrimination relates to job retention, we cannot expect ADA by itself to resolve the problems of hiring and low labor market activity rate. We must continue to examine the other barriers as well that we put on about the third slide of this presentation. So ADA should be labor market activity rate increase. I think it can if we combat workplace discrimination and do it more scientifically and do it more in an evidence-based manner. Should we increase the labor market activity rate that would be good, but ADA in itself could never take all the blame or all the credit for what happens in the labor market activity rate because it is only one factor and most of the action in Title I is not about hiring activity. Next, true or false. Our friends and social psychology research tell us workplace discrimination is more prevalent when it involves behavior disabilities, psychiatric and addictions. And if you look at next slide, that''s false. There are far more allegations in the area of physical, sensory and neuro disabilities than in mental or behavioral. And there is a far higher merit rate which means more actual discrimination in the former category as well, on the right-hand of that slide, contrary to the prevailing theories about stigma. And this is why you do research like this, to get away with our own stereotypical thinking even in academia. Next little quiz question I have for you, which group experiences the highest overall level of actual, not alleged, but actual workplace discrimination? Mental retardation, missing limbs, disfigurement, epilepsy, or AIDS, and the answer is, before we go to the answer, try keep this in mind, most impairment groups will have significant differences on two or three Title I issues. On two or three issues, okay? Maybe firing, training and wages for example. An average impairment group will have significant differences from the comparison group on two or three issues. Going to the next slide, in HIV/AIDS, 16 of the top 25 issues are statistically significant. Now, we haven''t studied every impairment group, we have only studied about 20 and there is 25 more to study. But we will never find anything that comes this close to this level of discrimination. 16 of the 25 top issues are statistically higher in terms of the proportion of allegations and the merit rate. Not only that, the overall merit rate is 32 percent, remember compared to 22 percent in a general disability population. It''s almost 50 percent higher. And if you look at specific issues like discrimination with respect to the provision of health insurance benefits, the merit rate is 61 percent compared to 29 percent of other disabilities and the merit rate is 54 percent on other benefits other than insurance compared to 22 percent for other disabilities. No impairment group has that level, those extraordinary nearly high levels of workplace discrimination compared to AIDS. Now, certainly a great question I would anticipate from you is, is it getting better or is it getting worse? And it is getting better. A lot of those high numbers are inflated from the early days of ADA, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 and so on. And gradually you see these numbers coming down as your efforts and all the educational efforts that have been ensued by public health people, health educators and so on about the real risk and dangers of AIDS, as well as the medical improvements that have been made that enable people with HIV to work longer and work safer, you begin to see improvements in these pictures. Next, which group reports the most disability harassment? SCI? TBI? Mental retardation? Traumatic brain injury? We have about 26,000 allegations of harassment, another 5,000 of intimidation. This is defined as bothering, tormenting, troubling, ridiculing, coercing an employee because of their disability. Jokes, epithets, graffiti, everybody knows what harassment is. We all learn about it because if no where else, we are all required to go to sexual harassment training where we work and we get a sense of what it means. And women in particular who are in this phone call now, know exactly what it means and they have been combating and dealing and understanding this for a long time. So which disability group is most experienced by harassment? Well, when you see what the answer is around Slide 28, that the answer mental retardation, traumatic brain injury or hearing impairment, you already know that harassment is insidious. How much more insidious is it, when you see that it is largely perpetrated against people who are compromised in their ability to understand or comprehend or hear the harassment activity. That''s a fascinating finding. If you move to the next slide, you begin to see other things that show the kind of integrity of the database that begins to make sense. For example, think about 751 people who have experienced workplace discrimination or harassment because of disfigurement. When we did our study on disfigurement, we weren''t too surprised to find that the biggest problem that we had was harassment in the area of non-wage benefits. There were more problems for disfigured people in the retail and service industry where attractiveness is valued, where people had a lot of public contact. We also were somewhat surprised to find thats slightly more merit rates. But what drives workplace discrimination for people who are disfigured as from burns, more than any other factors? And the answer is gender. I didn''t give that to you on the slide because I wanted you to think about that for a moment. Simply stated, here is a great example of the interactions of one characteristic with disabilities, ones gender simply stated. Males who are disfigured in workplace employment don''t have much problem with workplace discrimination. The number is multiples of what men experience if you happen to be female. So these things show what we call database integrity. The next series of slides I am going to go through quickly because I am running short on time. They just have to do with studies done here at VCU with respect to carpal tunnel disorders. And we begin to see database integrity, we begin to see that very much looks like a profile of injured workers, and that''s not too surprising. You begin to see some aspects of the interface of workers'' compensation and the ADA. Similarly, I regret we have to go fast. I guess, Ill just take a couple extra minutes to talk about the Sutton Trilogy and the case of diabetes. All the ADA literate people are familiar with the Sutton decision, but its combined in what is called the Sutton Trilogy in decisions, 3 court decisions, Sutton, Albertson, and Murphy versus UPS. That spoke to the question of what does a substantially limiting impairment mean, and the findings of the courts were substantially limiting must consider mitigating circumstances. And this sent shock waves through disability community in particular because there was tremendous fear and concern that it would dramatically reduce the number of people eligible for ADA protections and also it would embolden employers to discriminate more against certain groups. If you go to the slide that says Most Likely Impacts, the particular groups we were concerned about were diabetes, depression, epilepsy, even multiple sclerosis, conditions in which real substantial limitations can be ameliorated to a considerable extent by things like medications, prosthetics, or orthotics, assisted technology and even one psychological adjustment. In the consumer organizations in these areas were of course outraged by the Sutton decision, seeing that these people were going lose their protections. Its what they call in the next line the Sutton Catch 22. Consider a person with Type I diabetes, in which their hypoglycemic episodes are controlled by insulin. They are unfairly considered unfit to work but may not be impaired enough to be protected by ADA. Well, NCD expressed a lot of concerns in this, the National Council on Disability as with many other groups, their thoughts are reflected in the next slide. But I want you to go quickly because we are almost out of time to the slide that shows data on Sutton and Diabetes. What you see is if you cut the database on June 22nd 1999, the date of the Sutton Supreme Court decision, you look pre and post at the red numbers, you will see that especially look at the row that says months, you will see that there is a smaller number of months of course, post the Sutton decision. But the next column, the next row, allegations per month actually went up by people with diabetes bringing them forth to the EEOC. And the merit resolution rate also went up from 19 percent to 26 percent. So did more discrimination occur? Perhaps yes, perhaps discriminators were emboldened, but were the plaintiffs discouraged? No. And did the EEOC do its job? Yes. So it is one thing for the median and for us, people who are interested in civil rights protections, people with disabilities, to be concerned about some of these decisions but it also is going to be help when we do things like the perspective ADA Restoration Act, to be mindful of the facts and what the data says about what is actually happening. Next slide says, please keep in mind when we talk about an industry or employer or a group that has a higher than level merit rate and is experiencing more higher levels of workplace discrimination, than let''s say another industry that there are many, many favorable industry findings. There are many, many favorable issue findings and that these have to be reinforced or reinforced the positives. So for example, I''m just going to take hypothetically, we have studied this industry, happens to be health care. And I will tell you that I am in allied health so I could go to you know the largest guru in the health care industry and say I want give you an award because you have the below levels of discriminations on these types of issues and you do outstanding work with these populations and they really seemed to get it and be implementing it. I would like to bring them to VCU and have a big day for them and give them a big award and then of course I''d ask them for a large donation. And then privately, I''d say I''m going to tell you what the data also says about areas that you are vulnerable about disability populations that your industry does not appear to understand or does not appear to know how to accommodate, about parts of country where your operations are soft and about issues in which you are soft. So the point is, in our efforts to educate employers I think they want to know, I think they want to know what they are doing wrong and with whom and where and I think they want to know what they are doing and we have to acknowledge what they are doing well, as well. Let me summarize here in the last slide or two about what our team looks like. We have about 50 investigators all over the country in 9 universities. We have about 15 people who are trained now to be lead investigators that, means they can do these studies independently of me or of our core group at VCU. We have about 40 studies published or are in press. Three students have completed their dissertations using our data. One is going to complete this spring. The last dissertation was in the area of autism. The next dissertation will be in the area of learning disabilities. We are committed to doing at least 5 studies in 2007 and each year there after. We will probably do 10 or 15 but we like to low ball our hard and fast commitments in case something goes wrong. We are supported by 4 different grants, 3 from the NIDRR and 1 from the MS Society. We are grateful to them of course. This entire process began only four years ago, it was entirely voluntarily, really until this last October where through the DBTAC networks we were able to access funding to continue and expand our work. Any researchers can participate from any university if they want to come here and be trained on how it works and if they will subject themselves to the terms and stipulations of the use of the data and particularly the confidentiality concerns therein but it all operates in a very business like and professional approach and is closely linked to and monitored by our friends at the EEOC. Sorry I am finishing a few minutes late. I hope this material has been interesting to you. I hope that you will take the time to look at bibliography and access those studies and read them. I can certainly give you information on where you can purchase them in groups or at very low cost or for a study here or a study there I will try to provide you with a PDF copy or an accessible copy if that is what you require. You can always reach me by email at bmcbull@aol.com and I will be happy to answer questions that we either don''t get to today or respond to your request for more specific information. The last slide shows where these studies are published and you also have a complete bibliography of the study that have been published to date on the ADA Audio home page. Thanks so much for your time and attention, I look forward to receiving in the next half-hour or so your comments and your questions. Thank you.
Thank you Brian. Let''s bring the Operator back in so we remind folks on how they can ask questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you do have a question at this time, we ask that you please press the 1 on your touch tone phone and we will be taking the questions in the order they are received. If your question has been answered and you wish to withdraw your request, please press the pound key.
Ok, Brian, while we wait for folks to get in line there, one thing that I noticed that I thought people might find interesting in terms of what you title the hit parade was that disability harassment was number three in the total number of complaints that are, charges that are filed.
Yes, that is correct. There is a very interesting group that has studied disability harassment. I''ve been a part of it off and on but it''s headed by Norm Bourbon at the University of Wisconsin and as long as you asked, let me just tell you know, briefly what, what we learned about disability harassment. That allegations of intimidation tend to prevail a little bit more often than harassment. That harassment and intimidation are very difficult allegation to prove. As evidence by the fact that they have a lower merit rate of 19 percent as compared that standard number of 22 percent. And that really the only other major thing that drove disability harassment complaints other than the distinction between harassment and intimidation which is in itself somewhat controversial, was that Caucasian individuals had a slightly higher merit rate, which is really interesting to us was how harassment appears or does not appear in the individual disability specific studies, but the first study didn''t yield as much clear information as we would like. We will be happy to share it when anybody that''s interested in. But we want to do more sophisticated analyses, frankly to see what else we can tease out of issue and learn about the issue.
Very good. Operator, why dont we go and take our first question.
Our first question.
Go ahead with your question.
This is regarding the slide, the hit parade of issues, termination, reasonable accommodation, harassment. It just occurred to me, I was wondering if there was anything in research that could tease out the cause and effects here. But the first four sources that you have there, termination, reasonable accommodation, harassment, terms and conditions would tend to be the ones that have the most evidence collection around them, the most paperwork. And I wondered if that was a factor that played in here. For example, if you have a hiring discrimination, you are much less likely to know about the discrimination as is the case perhaps with the other two there that came out very low on the scale. Is there any way and conversely, a termination discrimination is going to have, in most organizations a huge paperwork trail behind it before it happens and hence, the person will have just more access to the information and evidence about the discrimination. Can you reflect upon that at all? Is there any way to tease out that issue?
Yes. That is a terrific observation. I have really never thought of it that way. I do think that''s a valid observation and we have plenty of people on line here from EEOC who might have an opinion on that. Again, this doesn''t have as much to do with, this is just the allegation rate so it doesn''t have to do the merit rate. It''s obviously a lot easier to find merit in something that has a good paper trail and good documentation. I think that''s a good explanation for reasonable accommodation, harassment, terms and conditions even hiring. The termination one was very easy to understand. Termination is about a third of the discrimination action in any population, okay. If you look at older Americans, African Americans, women, Hispanic Americans, religious discrimination, always about a third of the allegations comes from termination. We understand that one very well. You know, VCU gave out a 3 percent salary increase to faculty on average. So if I got 2 ½ percent so one of my colleague could get 3 ½ percent I might be angry, but Im not going to file a complaint about it. When you get terminated, there is a finality to it, you have nothing to lose and an emotionality to it, you are extremely angry about it that you are far more likely to register a formal compliant. So termination, we understand very, very well and yes, there is quite a paper trail that goes on around it. But the others, yours is very good theory. There is nothing in our database that could help test your particular theory about it however. I really appreciate that question, because there is a whole lot of things that are not in the database that we can''t study. For example, I would bet there is a question in the queue somewhere, can you study people''s occupation? It''s nice that you can study the industry they worked in, but it doesn''t tell you what they can do. But no the EEOC does not collect DOT codes about the charging parties. A vocational psychologist like would love that but I am hardly in a position to require it, so we are limited to the data that we have and there''s other things we don''t look at or won''t look at because for confidentiality reasons, but I certainly think yours is a very interesting observation.
Excellent. Operator, can we have our next question, please?
Certainly. Our next question.
I actually have three questions and comments. One, at the beginning you talked about not studying retaliation. I didn''t quite understand that. It says pretty clearly defined within the regulations. Two, as per the Sutton trilogy and it''s impact, do you think or do you have any data that might link up to the fact that more and more cases are going on prongs two and three wheres a lot of this revolved around definition of standards subsequent to the Sutton trilogy?
Let''s let Brian take your first two questions and then if we can get through to the queue to your third one then we will let you ask that one.
Sure.
First of all, with respect to retaliation, thank you. I realize this at beginning and I was rush coming I didn''t give a good explanation of that and I would like to. As you know, I''m working if I''m at work along side my friend and my friend files a complaint of discrimination and he begins to get a different teaching assignment or he doesn''t get, he gets a smaller office, he may file a subsequent complaint of retaliation. The point is, his complain on the retaliation is about the employer''s retaliatory behavior for his filing a complaint. It is not about because of his disability per se. So that is why at this time, at this time, we deferred studying retaliation complaints. Similarly, as you know, I could file a complaint on his behalf saying that I observed retaliation occurring or the complaint could be against me because I supported his complaint and I am not a disabled person at all. So I hope you begin to see why we took that and that''s a large number of complaints. I mean it''s hundreds, it''s tens of thousands of closed allegations and we set them aside because they''re not per se, related to the person''s disability status. They just happen to occur because an original complaint was filed under ADA Title I. Moving to your question about Sutton, outstanding point. In our study, because we''re not looking at, in that particular study that we did on Sutton, we are looking at the allegation rates and the merit rates excluding the second and third prongs of the definition. It would be really a great second follow up study. There are far more sophisticated studies we could do than what we did. We just did a pre and post study. We could do an extreme groups, we could do trend analysis and we could and should look at the other disability I''m sorry, the second and third prong of the definition because we do understand from EEOC that a number of the allegations moved to the second and third prongs of the definition post Sutton for many, many disability categories. But we have not documented that yet in our work but would like to do that.
Let''s go ahead, Operator take our next question.
Okay. Our next question.
Yes this, is a fairly simple question. I just wanted to make sure we got the e-mail address correct.
Okay. It''s pretty simple. My name is Brian McMahon. You start with about BMC and then bull like the Chicago Bulls you see because I am from Chicago.
Oh, that''s what we werent sure on, alright, thank you.
For 26 years I held season tickets in Chicago including all the glory years so I long time ago developed the acronym of bmcbull and that is at AOL.com.
Alright, Operator, our next question please.
Sure, our next question.
Yes, hi. I have been involved in chemical sensitivity issues for 25 years through nonprofit, and according to the EEOC, typically they said that, failure to accommodate people with multiple chemical sensitivity is two times the number of other disabilities. In that context, I wanted to know what does settlements in this area ,settlements which I know in the past few years back was 64 and now it is over 100 tell us about MCS discrimination, how successfully people with this disability can be accommodated or how to achieve a favorable response?
Great question. We finished a dissertation on this in the fall and it has been accepted for publication in a journal called Work. The same journal that you see listed with other publications in it. I can only tell you what the data says based on some summary notes I have from that study. We only have 1,183 closed allegations under Title I from people with chemical sensitivity. When we compare that to a general disability population, we find that they are positive on one issue and you hit on that issue, the failure to accommodate. I don''t know what the difference is, but I do know that it is a statistically significant.
Right I have been tracking it through the EEOC for some time.
We also find elevated discriminatory activity in manufacturing and in public administration and you are right, we also find it the charging parties tend to be older, with a mean age of 45 years compared to about 41 years. And they tend to be female. And you are absolutely right on the one point. There''s a far, far lower merit rate. This is the lowest merit rate we found, which means these are very, very difficult cases to prove, of 15.7 percent compared to 23 percent in the comparison group without replacement. I hope that helps you a little bit. If you e-mail me, I''ll be happy to send you an advanced copy of the complete manuscript which was done by Dr. Courtney Fitzgerald at Kent State Univerity.
Okay, will do, thank you.
All right. Thank you for the question. Lance our next question please.
Alright.
Hi, someone already asked the hiring question. I think there is a perception that it is harder to prove hiring discrimination, so you know what, it didn''t surprised me that you had a lesser number there, however, where does recruitment strategies show up in the data so things like website, applications those kinds of activities?
I am going down trying to find a suitable issues category that would have that. Let me just kind of read down, it doesnt take that long beyond what we have gotten to constructive discharge. In order, the next ones would be lay-off, promotion, wages, demotion, reinstatement, suspension, benefits, job assignment. First benefits was benefits other than insurance, next comes benefits with insurance, prohibited medical inquiry, recall training, union representation, involuntary retirement, unfavorable references, job classification, benefits qualification standards, and seniority. Now what I am saying is, those things have had to do with other recruitment practices, they would all be found as subsets really, sub-activities of hiring, but if it is something else, the allegation activity is so low that there''s not even 300 or 400 allegations in the whole data set .
Well, what I''m trying to get at is that we are finding more and more employers are recruiting online.
Yes.
And we don''t have any basis for looking at this and I guess I was checking your data.
Oh, okay. I''m sorry. Your question is a very good one. For us it would be coded as hiring, but our data does not tease that out to talk within hiring what the specific problem.
Okay. Thank you.
Operator, can we have our next question, please? Go ahead with your question.
Yes, I just had a question about I believe it''s Slide 11.
If you could either pick up the hand set or get closer to the speaker it would allow everyone to be able to hear you a little better.
Yes. I had a question about Slide 15, with the merit, proven merit of cases. Do you feel that it''s more of a related to accessible of assistance with like legal assistance, towards proving the merit those cases where an employer has more resources to find legal assistance as compared to the individual with a disability?
That''s a great question. Let''s try to keep in mind that you know, the whole point of the EEOC and the EEOC process is to extent possible, keep the attorneys out. In other words, even though an attorney might send somebody to the EEOC but not be very actively involved unless a settlement is being discussed or once we see that process through, to then decide whether or not to take it to litigation. So I can''t tell you what portion of these applicants are legally represented. I think the biggest thing I would like people to understand about that big difference, 78 to 22 percent is this, these are the categories that we code as merit. I hope the EEOC people really listen to this, because it may not be the way they think of as merit. But in terms of the research group, this is how we code merit. Merit includes when a case with withdrawn with benefits by the charging party, when a case is settled with benefits to the charging party, when the EEOC determines that there is a cause finding that discrimination did occur and the employer accepts the remedies, which is coded as successful conciliation, and even when the employer does not accept the remedies which is coded as conciliation failure. We regard all those as merit. Under no merit side, you get no cause findings where there''s full EEOC investigation occurred and failed to support the alleged violation, but also you get a very, very large number of what are called administrative closures okay. And this is anything from the employer file bankruptcy, the charging party cannot be located or is unresponsive or uncooperative. The case was closed because of the outcome of some separate litigation that was, that the case was also involved in. So, you see if the case, let''s say goes away, we record that as a non-merit finding because merit could never be established. I guess you might say that the employer kind of gets off the hook, but the case is closed out but it isn''t closed out where theres a clear finding of merit or lack of merit. So the 78 percent includes all of administrative closures which is probably about half of that number. That''s what explains the huge difference. Again, those proportions though hold up regardless of the statute. Those are very, very constant numbers in almost all Civil Rights statutes relating to employment.
Alright, thank you for the question. Operator, go ahead with our next question
Yeah, one moment. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen to register for a question, please press the one on your touch tone phone.
Brian, what were some of the industry that you were able to identify within the database?
Okay. The bad news is the way that we coded industry in all of the studies that you have, hold on, I have to pull it up for a moment. We are capable of isolating in the studies we have done so far, any of these industries. We basically use what today they would call super sectors or broad categories of industry, agriculture, mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation and utilities, wholesale retails, financial which includes financial insurance and real estate and then in the old SIC code system services. Well, now, this is how I spent my spring break last week other than watching NCAA game. I had to hand code all 369,000 SIC codes which is 1987 usage to 2002 North American Industry Classification system. So now we have far more refined industries, what it basically does is, it breaks up things like transportation separate it from utility and takes all the services which is really important because in old FIC language, services were about 60 percent of all American workers and it breaks them up into the families of services within that. So now, we have isolated out health care services, hospitality services, information technology services, and so on. So the new system in 2002 is far more refined and now we have the database organized by industry in that way. The industry designations are relatively reliable and we have them on 90 percent of all the allegations.
Excellent, we have a question that someone submitted online and the question is asking about comparisons with other federal laws that the EEOC enforces and the fact that you had mentioned that termination and the merit resolution are about the same for ADHR with charges filed by other protected classes. But the question is are there any significant differences in the ADA data when compared to age discrimination charges filed under the Civil Rights Act.
Okay. There are less than a dozen interagency personnel agreements for research involving the EEOC data. Only VCU and Cornell and their people are on the line have the data that we have. As you can see, for example, the last question was about industry designation, we have only done one industry studies so far, and that happens to be on health care. Now we have 19 more industry studies to do. Every issue study, every issue and theres 25 of them, every impairment and theres 45 of them, every industry and theres 20, one could do about six studies within each of those. Okay? Now, we have only done 30 studies all day and Cornell has done some, so we have just began to scratch the surface and there''s no way that our group is going to leave ADA and look at how ADA behaves as compared to the Civil Rights Act for example. Don''t get me wrong. It isnt that we wouldn''t love to do it, I think what I am saying is that we have enough on our plate thats going to take me and my children and grandchildren into this kind of work. And the other 10 universities that have inner agencies personnel agreements are not even working with, they are working with EEO1 data, they are not doing any studies with the data we use which is called The Integrated Management System. So we are the only people in EEOC working with this database. Only ADA is being studied with it, and try to understand EEOC has no NIDRR. It has no research, you know wing or division like the Department of Education and so it''s relied upon other groups largely for volunteers to come forward and do this kind of work. Boy, I wish we had a research team large enough to begin to tackle those questions, but we are not even on the tip of the iceberg that what we can do within the ADA Title I.
All right. So you''re saying you are not currently looking for more work?
I often think about comparing our law with other laws, but it isn''t going to happen on my watch.
Operator, can we go to our next question, please.
Certainly.
Go ahead with your question.
Hi, thanks Peter. I have a few questions and I always tend to get a little skeptical when I am looking at data. But I think this is really interesting and helpful. My question concerns termination, there''s a couple of connected questions regarding overlap of issues. So how do you look at situations, one where people alleged multiple basis for discrimination, age, race, gender and disability and two, I was wondering again with the hit parade of issues with termination issues, in cases we see sometimes termination is related to the failure to provide reasonable accommodation or in terms of failure to look at reasonable accommodations when analyzing the direct threat situation. So I was wondering how those subset of termination were looked at and as well as any hostile work environments were include in this analysis?
Okay, I think you did a great job of squeaking in three.
I''m sorry. As I was talking, more came up.
Thats okay. Hostile work environment, no, we don''t look at that. Great question is, you have a very great question in your first question, which is if an individual files a complaint under ADA and he is also filing a gender complaint, would we pick that up? We do have the capabilities to do that but we don''t. We only look at what they bring under the ADA and we do acknowledge the fact that individuals do file multiples allegations. So when I give you those numbers like100,000 allegations, that''s not 100,000 people. The typical charging party is bringing forward about 1.8 allegations. Now, do we have, and this goes to that question and then your second question. Do we have the capability to look at patterns of allegations brought by a subject, for example, do people bring reasonable accommodation allegation and termination together? The answer is yes, we do have the capabilities to look at that, but there''s only one impairment group and that''s because we had funding for it, multiple sclerosis where we have done 6 studies now. In those third, fourth and fifth studies we were able to get sophisticated enough that we could look at the kinds of patterns you are describing. So my answer is to date, we''ve only done for multiple sclerosis.
Okay. Thank you. That''s very helpful, it helps me understand everything better.
I think the Callers question is just terrific because it shows that as interesting as some of these findings are, the kinds of studies we are doing at this point in history are very rudimentary. Statistically speaking, they are not very challenging or cumbersome at all. What''s cumbersome is the size and scope of the database. But the types of analysis and questions we are answering are very fundamental. When you do database mining, each finding you have is intended to generate more questions and more hypotheses like the Caller is asking and then we are able to go deeper and deeper. I would like to ask the audience to think about it this way, what we know about work place and discrimination and disability under ADA Title I, if you look thought about it pictorially, it''s been historically drawn with stick men with pencil on white paper and what we are trying do is add color to that in hue and add depth and look at it in two, three, four dimensions in the interactions and multiple factors. But it''s a process that is frankly either going to take a heck of a bigger investment by somebody or a lot more people and a lot more time than our group which sounds like a big group of 50 investigators. But again, your questions are great because they show what the hope and promises of a database like this. And they also make us feel very albeit excited very inadequate in that we''ve just begun to really touch the surface of it.
Operator, could we have our next question please.
Yes, hi everyone. I''m very glad that I can be on this call and I want to thank Robin Jones for expediting things for me. First of all, ODEP, many of you on this call knows it stands for Office of Disability Employment Policy at Department of Labor. And I was very intrigued with the information that has come across through this especially Brian, your data on a lot of the issues, you were saying one of the number one issues, the retention issue that you are starting to find and that someone earlier on the call asked a question related to age and you said you are starting to see a lot of the age groups, a lot of the complaints are 45 plus and over. So, you''ve got an age discrimination, possibility thing because the ADEA-Age Discrimination Employment Act has to deal with 40 plus and over. And then you''ve got the issues of getting older with a disability and some of you may or may not know that there''s a huge task force on the aging of American work force as there''s an interagency task force and ODEP is playing a very strong role in that and we are making sure we get disability issues involve with the aging of the Americans and we are also studying a lot of issues dealing with retention and this is quite interesting that you brought this up. So we are looking at all the workplace flexibility, things that are out there and it''s really huge, and we are working, trying to make, we are in the early stages but we are making a lot of partnerships or whatever you want to call them with a lot of groups that are doing or collaborations would be a better word, that are doing things on workplace flexibility and trying to infuse the disability aspects into this big trend in the workforce and even the Sloan Foundation is funding a lot of areas to look at this, one of which is at Georgetown University Law Center with one of our ADA heroes Chai Feldblum and Katie Corrigan are the co-leaders of that. So there''s a lot of folks working on this. I just to put my comments in and I am very glad you are doing this Brian. It just puts a whole new data set on what, some of the things we already did know and some of things we didn''t know. So I''m just saying ODEP is working on this area as well because I work on the adult policy team and we are very pleased that you are doing this research and that you did mention the EEOC does not really have a research arm like NIDRR at the Department of Education and other parts of that. Very interesting, very interesting data that we, I just never realized that.
Thank you for your comments and we appreciate all your good work at ODEP. We are working hard in the DBTAC network to get closer, closer relationships with ODEP, we hope research can be a part of that. I hasten to add that one thing ODEP and the DBTACs are really good at and it gets lost in the presentation like this, when you talk about work place discrimination it sounds so negative, what you guys are both really good at is catching the employers doing something right and shining a light on them and then encouraging business to business communications and letting employers learn from each other about employment and disability. This is kind of the underside of that okay but what I want to make very clear too is this same database of work place discrimination can also be used to identify a number of employers and industry whose allegation and merit rates are very low and therefore they must be doing something right and we can catch them doing that and we can reward them even by, even through this seemingly negative database. It''s kind of like going to a community of the year and say one of great things about living in, I can''t say Richmond, Virginia but Ashland, Virginia any how, it''s very low crime rate. That''s the kind of thing we can do. With these data, compliments the kinds of things ODEP and DTBACs do with their real smart approach of shining the light on best practices. And who is next?
Excellent, Operator, can we get one more question in here? We are getting close to the bottom of the hour but I think we can take one more.
We had a question, could you speak to the patterns basically in terms of geographical patterns that you find higher incidents or reports of problems in the workplace with, for instance we are sitting obviously in the mid-west here and how would that compare with what you might see in the northeast or you know, southern regions.
Okay. I can do that and I''m going to put the phone down for about 15 seconds and pull up a chart for myself.
Alright, while Brian is doing that, a quick reminder that the next audio conference with take place April 17th and the topic will be the ADA Restoration Act and we have Andy Imparato join us.
Okay, please understand that you hit on a point, I want to try to be brief because we are on the last question, but this a very sensitive matter as you can imagine to the EEOC because it pertains to the confidentiality issue. When we study the regions of the country so far, we use U.S. Census Super Regions and in other words the whole country is divided into only four regions. You know, we have the ability to get a specific at states, we have ability to get a specific at zip codes but you can''t start to do that without making the identity of some employers, particularly larger employers is kind of obvious. So, in our first cut of the data we only use four geographic regions. The northeast, the mid-west, the south and the western states and if you go to the U.S. Census Bureau map, it''s first cut at regions will be these four categories. Plus, foreign complaints, in other words, an American worker in an American company in Belgium could be discriminated against ADA and bring in a complaint as well as the territories. The numbers look like these, the largest would be the southern United States at 70,000 allegations, followed by the mid-west at 52,000, followed by the west at 32,000, followed by the northeast at 19,000. Now, I hasten to add those regions are not comparable on the population basis, so do not take away from that, that there''s more discrimination activity under ADA on a per capita basis in the southern United States. That would not be accurate. But if that helps you at all, those are the real numbers.
Excellent.
Thank you.
Well, Brian, I want to really thank you for the presentation today. If you have questions that did not get answered, didn''t get a chance to ask your question, please feel free to contact your Regional ADA Center who can forward those on to Brian or you can send those directly to him via e-mail. You can contact your Regional ADA Centers by calling 1-800-949-4232. Another quick reminder, next month April 17th we have Andy Imparato from the American Association of Persons with Disabilities AAPD, to talk about the ADA Restoration Act. You can find information about that on the ADA Audio home page, www.ada-audio.org. Another reminder, that the transcript and audio archive from today''s session will be able on the ADA Audio home page in approximately 7 to 10 business days. Again, Brian, I want to thank you. As you look at Brians bio you will see that he is a University of Wisconsin graduate and we didn''t even have to get into any issues about the Badgers and what they did on Sunday here at the United Center in Chicago.
Thanks for avoiding that.
Absolutely, thank you to everyone that joined us today and hopefully we will see you down the line at another audio session. Thank you.