| The workshop on Disability, Work and Cash Benefits convened some 5060 of the nation's leading scholars in disability studies, income security policy, labor economics, and rehabilitation to explore the overarching policy question before the workshop: How might we alter public policy to promote employment, where feasible, as well as foster community integration and economic self-sufficiency of working-age Americans who find themselves, through illness, injury, aging, birth, or environmental barriers, to be counted among the nation's persons with disabilities. |
| The workshop, held December 810, 1994, in Santa Monica, California, was jointly sponsored by the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) of the U.S. Department of Education and the National Academy of Social Insurance (the Academy). It proved to be a highly productive collaboration between our two organizations' complementary roles in promoting research and understanding of disability policy. |
| The mission of NIDRR is to promote the independence of persons who have disabilities by seeking improved systems, products, and practices in the rehabilitation process. It does this by funding research and training in medical or vocational rehabilitation, the development of assistive technology, and policy research on issues of particular importance to persons with disabilities. Its support of this workshop aptly fits within this mission. |
| The Academy encourages research, understanding, and sound policy for the nation's social insurance programsthe largest of which is Social Security, or Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance. In the United States, as in other industrialized countries, social insurance programs have the common purpose of protecting workers and their families against the risk of severe financial hardship when they lose income from work because of insured-against events. In the United States those include work injury (workers' compensation), involuntary job loss (unemployment insurance) or retirement, death of a family worker or severe long-term work disability (Social Security). Coverage under social insurance programs is broadly based, generally pooling the risk of wage loss that all workers share by covering workers across the occupational, earnings, and age spectra. Such programs are closely tied to work. They are financed by contributions from earnings while people are employed, and they provide income continuity to workers and their families when earnings are lost for reasons beyond the worker's control. |
| Because of its expertise in social insurance, the Academy in 1991 was asked by the Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means of the U. S. |
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