(ADA Watch/CDRJ) Labor Day was never really about the people whose names end up on the plaque. It is about the work—the early mornings, the late nights, the unglamorous shifts, and the essential labor that keeps an engine running long after the applause fades. That is just as true of the disability rights and justice movement as it is of any shop floor or picket line.
When DREDF’s Arlene Mayerson wrote an early history of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1992, she was careful about where she placed the credit. The law, she argued, belonged “not to any one person, or any few.” It belonged to the thousands of people who spent years organizing, testifying, lobbying, and showing up—often without recognition—because they believed the cause was bigger than any single name attached to it. That history matters today, because movement durability still depends on how we define and value labor.
Too often, advocacy ecosystems default to models of leadership that concentrate legitimacy in the hands of a few. Sometimes that takes the form of closed tables where a small circle assumes the authority to decide who belongs in the coalition and who is permitted to speak for the whole. Other times, it comes from ideological gatekeeping that dismisses the complex, demanding work of operational infrastructure—policy analysis, coalition communications, digital organizing tools, fundraising, and administrative coordination—as merely “performative.”
Gatekeeping does not become democratic simply because it is practiced in a T-shirt instead of a suit. In either setting, narrowing the circle diminishes the power of the movement. Real policy impact and lasting civil rights enforcement require breadth, not exclusivity. When national progress is measured only by the statements of an insular inner circle, the vital labor of state, local, and cross-movement advocates is erased.
Democratic legitimacy is built by widening the table, ensuring that power, resources, and recognition are shared across the full spectrum of our community. Movement infrastructure is not performative; it is the essential bedrock of collective power. Organizing multi-state mobilizations, maintaining shared civic data commons, facilitating broad-based coalition sign-on efforts, and supporting grassroots groups on the frontlines are the hard, unglamorous mechanics that make major legislative and cultural breakthroughs possible.
ADA Watch and the Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice (CDRJ) are committed to that model of distributed strength. No single organization, inner circle, or individual owns this movement. Its authority and resilience come directly from the diverse forms of labor that built it and continue to sustain it.
We know this from the movement’s own history. The Road to Freedom Bus Tour did not cross the country on the back of a single charismatic figurehead. It moved because organizers, advance teams, drivers, road crews, musicians, local hosts, and community advocates and activists each carried their share of the load. That collective, distributed effort mobilized the national support needed to restore the civil rights protections of the ADA—labor formally recognized in the Congressional Record upon the passage of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008.
That is the tradition we carry forward. True leadership is not about controlling the perimeter; it is about building durable, democratic scaffolding designed to outlast any single organization or individual, ensuring the work stands strong long after any of us has left the room.
This Labor Day, we honor the policy strategists, grassroots organizers, road crews, data stewards, local advocates and activists, and countless others—past and present—whose daily, often invisible labor is the real infrastructure of our movement.
Human dignity, access, inclusion, and civil rights are never won through a single voice. They are built, shift by shift, by the people whose collective work moves us forward.
— JW
ADA Watch is an initiative of the Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice (CDRJ). We AMPLIFY the many voices of the disability rights and justice movement.