This year’s holiday celebrations cap a recent flurry of summer activities aimed at improving meaningful employment options and outcomes for PwD.

Some signs of encouragement

In July, the nation celebrated the 20 year anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the history of this country. ADA Title II & Title III (accessibility to public transportation and public accommodations) regulations are to be published in a week.

In addition, President Obama signed an Executive Order on July 26 that will help transform the disability employment landscape within the Federal Government. It calls on all Federal departments and agencies to increase the numbers of people with disabilities hired and to improve retention and return-to-work of Federal employees with disabilities. This will hopefully reverse the trend of the last 20 years that has seen a steady decline in Federal employment for people with disabilities. If accomplished, it will achieve stated White House commitments from every administration since the Clinton Presidency towards a goal of having 100,000 Federal workers with disabilities in the government workforce.

People with disabilities are used to an uphill climb while seeking employment

In August, The U.S. Department of Labor announced a solicitation for grant applications for approximately $22 million to fund programs that will improve educational, training and employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities. In her comments regarding the achievement of ” No workers left behind”, Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said that “To be truly competitive in the global economy, we must leverage and foster the professional skills and talents of every single worker, including the millions of working-age people with disabilities across our country.” The new Disability Employment initiative is a joint project of the Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration and its Office of Disability Employment Policy. For those who have worked with Federal agencies, intra-agency collaborations are a too rare common sense occurrence.

Funds will be awarded to state workforce agencies, which will collaborate with workforce investment boards and local areas.Grant awards will range from $1.5 to $6 million each to be spent over a three-year period. Cooperative agreements will be used to foster service delivery through the public workforce investment system for job seekers with disabilities.Programs will build upon the Labor Department’s Disability Program Navigator initiative and other model service delivery strategies.

These grants are investments representing “new money” specifically targeted towards people with disabilities and is a positive step forward. They demonstrate a commitment to aligning the department’s goal of helping workers in low-wage jobs, or those out of the labor market, find pathways into the middle class. Improvements in employment services for people with disabilities through these grants will help combat the unacceptably low employment rates experienced by this group. My main concerns are that many states have either eliminated or curtailed their Disability Navigator programs (it is gone in Arizona), so linkage developments through state systems will have to be rebuilt just to ramp up to becoming operational. Also, with an average annual award of $500,000 per grantee and lack of business community commitments/connections, it is not clear as to what metrics will be considered when measuring the success of the initiative.

Another grant opportunity through the Office of Disability Employment Policy which announced in August, approximately $2.3 million to fund up to four cooperative agreements ranging from $500,000 to $625,000 in support of the Add Us In initiative. Add Us In is designed to increase the ability of minority-owned, operated and controlled businesses to employ adults and youth with disabilities. Grant recipients will develop and evaluate replicable models, strategies and policies to ensure that youth and adults with disabilities from diverse communities have access to a broader range of employment and mentoring opportunities. In addition, grantees will form and strengthen connections among targeted businesses, diversity-serving, youth-serving and disability-serving organizations thereby building a national and local network of experts skilled in serving individuals with disabilities from diverse communities. There is a lot riding on the future both of these grant initiatives which are kind of “one shot” propositions.

The bar to meet eligibility requirements is complicated, but also the right kind of formula as it puts together true community-based efforts that link the public and private sectors together around compatible common goals/objectives. The priority requires that consortia applying for the cooperative agreement must have representation from each of the following four organization types: 1) An association of targeted businesses, a business association located in a target population community, targeted business entities, association of targeted businesses, association of targeted business owners or other similar entity; 2) A disability-serving organization; 3) A Local Workforce Investment Board (LWIB) or other organization with demonstrated experience in providing employment and training services and employment-related support services (e.g., One-Stop center); 4) and Youth-serving organization. Once the grantees are announced, it will be critical to track the progress of their efforts to develop national models that are replicable and new data to substantiate the business case for hiring qualified people with disabilities as well as the abilities of the private/public sectors to cross utilize resources effectively. These outcomes will be critical to make the case for either sustained or increased funding.

Bucket of cold water-in-face reality check

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal shares with business readers the results of the government’s first detailed look at disabled workers’ employment. The articles conclusions: the report shows American workers with disabilities are far more likely than the overall work force to be older, working part-time or jobless. A couple of individual examples of otherwise qualified and unemployed professionals were used to illustrate the data from the reports and findings.
The WSJ stated that this is the first time the government has looked closely at the employment situations of such workers.

What are the best measures to establish who is most qualified?

Scott Hamilton’s oft quoted statement”the only disability in life is a bad attitude” -meant to serve as his inspiration in recovering from cancer-sees a reverse twist in many of the reader responses for this article. In brief, the majority of respondents see nothing contradictory or unusual when they say that having disabilities means your career will automatically be limited due to you not being as productive as other workers who do not have disabilities (objection to the term “automatically limits” career potential) . I read comments that believe that this lack of productivity on the part of a PwD is just a natural discrepancy, and high levels of un/underemployment should not be viewed as discrimination (except when you are not even able to get an interview or promotion when disclosing). Other reader’s expressed that having a disability is not a temporary condition, and in these days of high unemployment with other similarly qualified workers available with no disabilities, why should we hire you? (We are a problem because we want “unreasonable considerations” or expect to be hired based on charity). When one writer reminded those expressing this opinion that we are not the disabled, but people with disability, the response was that after businesses being screwed by EEOC on race, gender, etc. the business community will not be forced by PC ideologues to make any more hiring preferences.

Still chasing the dream

These are all arguments and viewpoints expressed before (with greater or lesser degrees of vehemence), and show how much work is still to be done to provide proof that people with disabilities look for the same reasons to be hired as anyone else- they are the best available and most qualified candidates for a job, promotion, or retention. It is getting past the unreasonable bias and barriers of people who have not been convinced to think beyond the meanings of labels we use to create the categories of who is/isn’t a capable employment candidate. Community advocates and employment collaboratives must put out a consistent message that talks about building business confidence through empowering employers with best/next HR practices- not by doing charitable tokenism”favors”. The business leadership roundtables who are experiencing workplace success must redouble their efforts to share that workforce development exemplified in hiring people with disabilities strengthens their double bottom line. It is both the right thing and the smart thing to do

Author Bio: Since 1982, Life Development Institute staff and its administrators are devoted to actively work with and support parents who are eager for a place where their adult-child can thrive and succeed. For more information about adult special education topics visit Life Development Institute.

Category: Education
Keywords: adult special education, life development institute, special education phoenix, special needs adults