PROGRAM 2: WHAT'S WORK GOT TO DO WITH IT? Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project's second hour begins as Laurie Block, the series' producer and narrator, ponders her daughter's future. All parents want their children to grow up to be independent; and in America, independence is equated with having a job. From adults who have lived with disabilities, Block learns that despite ambition, motivation, and models of success, people with disabilities face a struggle to grow up independent. And nearly all of them must struggle with what they call the System: the interlocking and multilayered bureaucracy of social services and benefits they need to stay healthy and self-supporting. What's Work Got to Do With It? digs down through layers of the System to find the contradictions and impulses from which it sprang. We have always had a social compact--an agreement that there are people who need help. That compact has grown over the centuries, from the almshouse and charitable handouts to the Federal payments that today add up to $200 billion a year. And that sum doesn't include a group of people who have always had a special claim on our help: disabled veterans. In a way, the modern social compact, "the system" , begins with the plans made for disabled Civil War veterans. Rather than creating a class of dependent men living "dull and wretched" lives in federal hospitals, planners urged that disabled vets be returned to their homes and families; that they be given the "lighter occupations" in the community -- and that they get a pension. By 1900 those pensions had become the largest single expenditure of the government. For those who were disabled but not vets, though, there wasn't much: Workers' Compensation and Vocational Rehabilitation served some people by the 1920s. In the 1930s the Federal Government entered the social compact: the New Dealers wanted to include disability pensions in the Social Security act. Before this could happen, another war brought home a big new group of disabled men. Block visits Harold Russell, who won an Academy Award for his role as a disabled veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives, and was a longtime chairman of the President's Committee for the Employment of the Handicapped. The President's Committee sought to change employer attitudes, but by the 1970s, a new generation of people with disabilities began demanding, not benefits or kindness, but guaranteed access to workplaces, schools and institutions -- efforts that would eventually lead to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But even as that campaign was being waged, the Social Security Administration was unintentionally locking many people with disabilities into further dependence. Social Security Disability Insurance provides cash to those who are unable to do any work at all. It and Supplemental Security Income allow those who qualify to also receive Medicare, a benefit often more valuable to many people with disabilities than the cash payment. Catch-22: you can't have one without the other. Kept from seeking work lest they lose health insurance, many people with disabilities have been profoundly frustrated: historian Paul Longmore publicly burned his own book when his earnings from it threatened to cut off the insurance he needs to live. Working is central to the American conception of independence. Not all people with disabilities can work, and many need assistance to live an independent life. Civil rights laws have helped make the environment increasingly accessible, but old ideas and attitudes persist. Politicians talk about getting the "able-bodied" off welfare. What assumptions do we have about disabled people's ability to work? If disability is seen as a ticket out of the work force, what message does that send to young people growing up with disabilities? How can we reform a system built on the vestiges of incongruous and incompatible programs so as not to further stigmatize the people who need it most?